Douglas Rushkoff Quotes

When advertising is involved, you, the user, are the product.

It is probable that Facebook boasts the broadest, deepest, and most comprehensive dataset of human information, interests, and activity ever collected.

Google is omniscient of what people search for and do. Facebook has over a billion subscribers, meaning Mark Zuckerberg has personal information about one in every seven people on Earth. U.S.A., Brazil, Mexico, India and Indonesia are at the top of that list.

Everyone and his Big Brother wants to log your browsing habits, the better to build a profile of who you are and how you live your life - online and off. Search engine companies offer a benefit in return: more relevant search results. The more they know about you, the better they can tailor information to your needs.

If you are interacting with anything on your phone or your computer, it is specifically designed to collect as much data about you as possible, so that that can then be monetized.

The liberation children experience when they discover the Internet is quickly counteracted by the lure of e-commerce web sites, which are customized to each individual user's psychological profile in order to maximize their effectiveness.

Facebook is not your friend, it is a surveillance engine.

The hours Facebook users put into their profiles and lists and updates is the labor that Facebook then sells to the market researchers and advertisers it serves.

People say Facebook connects the world. Facebook has 5,000 Ph.D.s that think about how to make you click on ads you don't want to see. Their business model is about something that most people would not perceive as making the world better.

Serving up ads based on behavioral targeting can itself be an invasion of privacy, especially when the information used is personal.

Everyone should acknowledge a simple truth: The heart and soul of today's Internet economy is the collection of data, mainly for use in targeted advertising.

There is no longer any anonymity on the Web - unless we mandate it. The most personal information about your online habits is collected, bought and sold, often instantaneously and invisibly. Data collection is a business driven by profits at consumers' expense.

The more Zuckerberg knows about you, the more media he will be able to bring you.

We are moving into a world where companies will be able to offer us products and services based on our last two hours of activity. This is both exciting and frightening at the same time.

I am completely opposed to the concept of big data.

Google, Facebook, and other consumer web companies violate our privacy. But that's only because they have an ad-based business model. They can only make money by selling your data - and degrading the product experience with ads.

We Facebook users have been building a treasure lode of big data that government and corporate researchers have been mining to predict and influence what we buy and for whom we vote. We have been handing over to them vast quantities of information about ourselves and our friends, loved ones and acquaintances.

Advertising isn't just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought. At every company that sells ads, a significant portion of their engineering team spends their day tuning data mining, writing better code to collect all your personal data.

Internet privacy is dwindling. Every purchase you make, flight you take, website you view, file you download, person you call, and e-mail you send is tracked. … and then stored indefinitely and often sold to the highest bidder—whoever that may be. Personal data, long thought to be confidential simply isn’t anymore.

Google, Facebook, and the thousands of other companies that seek to join their ranks do more every day to collect data about you and I than any surveillance state could ever accomplish. They track our behavior, our communications. The moment to moment decisions we make in every room of our house

People voluntarily surrender personal and seemingly private information to trans-national corporations which exploit that data for profit. Few think twice about it.

The sheer amount of information captured from the average Google user makes this company a particularly big threat.

These 'free' applications ask for permission to read your emails, your text messages, listen to your phone calls, record video from your phone. Why else would someone spend millions developing an application which they then give away? Kind-hearted, maybe? Get real.

Corporations like Google, Facebook, Amazon, all of these large companies, are making tens or hundreds of billions of dollars off of monetising people's data.

What's so bad about Google knowing I need Kleenex? Look at it in the aggregate - see how information... can be used to target people based on their profiles and change the course of human history, as I believe it is already beginning to do. This knowledge that I need Kleenex has bigger complications than just needing Kleenex.