As with Google, it was advertising that made Facebook money. The crucial difference was that Google simply helped people find the things they had already decided to buy, whereas Facebook enabled advertisers to deliver targeted messages to users, tailored to meet the preferences they had already revealed through their Facebook activity. Once ads were seamlessly inserted into users\u2019 News Feeds on the Facebook mobile phone app, the company was on the path to vast profits, propelled forward by the explosion of smartphone usage.<\/p>\n
The smartphone is our telescreen. And, thanks to it, Big Zucker is watching you \u2014 night and day, wherever you go. Unlike the telescreen, your phone is always with you. Unlike the telescreen, it can read your thoughts, predicting your actions before you even carry them out. It\u2019s just that Big Zucker\u2019s 24\/7 surveillance isn\u2019t designed to maintain a repressive regime. It\u2019s just designed to make money.<\/p>\n
The only law of history is the law of unintended consequences. Is anyone \u2014 apart from Zuckerberg, that is \u2014 really surprised that, during the seven-year period when app developers had free access to Facebook users\u2019 data, unscrupulous people downloaded as much as they could? Do we seriously believe that Cambridge Analytica are the only people who did this? Can you give me one good reason why, after Barack Obama and his minions smugly boasted about their use of Facebook in his 2012 reelection campaign, Donald Trump\u2019s campaign was not entitled to try similar methods four years later?<\/p>\n