That's fine then. And I agree with you. But leave you with this.
Do. Not. Give. The. Company. Your. Data.
They are literally "non-corporal" entities and work toward increasing profit and stakeholder value
Again, I agree. But if you think this is a bad thing, then you don't believe in capitalism, and I'm not quite sure what the intention is to argue this point on a platform (HN) that encourages the most basic forms of capitalism - starting up companies with innovative technology and solutions.
People You May Know employs tons of shady stuff Facebook doesn’t reveal and has saved their bacon early on from stagnating at around 100M users.
https://mashable.com/article/people-you-may-know-facebook-cr...
Facebook Beacon and others had a big outcry. They got hauled into Congress multiple times. And of course whenever they get caught, they always throw a “mea culpa” and do it all over again in a year under a different name. Here they are recording faces of their users secretly using camera permisions!!
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/facebook-app-recording-ca...
Their entire business model is “Give us all your data for free.” Mark Z early on was flabbergasted himself when he realized he no longer needed to scrape sites on Harvard’s house websites and could just ask people to submit the data for each other: “They ‘trust me’, dumb fucks.”
https://www.esquire.com/uk/latest-news/a19490586/mark-zucker...
Proceeds to build entire business on this data…
BUT THEN. Someone else does it to them and they get mad. “You can’t scrape us!” LinkedIn tried this:
https://www.zdnet.com/google-amp/article/court-rules-that-da...
And it’s not like capitalist enterprises even try to be consistent in their legal complaints:
https://9to5mac.com/2022/04/14/apple-calls-out-meta-for-hypo...
Corporations, by nature, work in a way that individuals at those companies don't. They are literally "non-corporal" entities and work toward increasing profit and stakeholder value, not improving the lives or situations of their users, unless that happens to correspond to making them more money.
We should all be wary of corporate control and claim to rights built from their user base, especially if those services are offered for "free".