Daniel Lyons Quotes

Over at Barb Bowman, she's arguing that we should turn off Facebook's tracking of ads. I totally disagree; those trackers make newsfeed filtering work better and potentially could help bring me better ads, which improves my life.

It simply isn't acceptable for the likes of Google, Facebook, Amazon and others, which amass data by the terabyte, to say, 'Don't worry, your information's safe with us, as all sorts of rules protect you' - when all evidence suggests otherwise.

You can go to Pinterest, and they'll get to know who your friends are, but they don't get to know very much about what you've done in the past. They're starting with little information about you, and they have to do this personalization.

Targeted ads, I think, are useful because I don't want to see all the crap. I'm not interested in buying a Mercedes Benz, but I am interested in buying a new MacBook Air. So if organizations like Facebook can actually make the ads more relevant to me, if they know what I am interested in, I have no problem with that.

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.

The nice thing about Reddit is, we don't have to sell your data or build a profile of you or do stuff that makes people feel uncomfortable.

When you use Facebook, you're always logged in, and your identity and relationships - to others, to content, to apps and services - are assets Facebook can use to customize your experience (oh, and your ads).

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.

No entity in the history of the world has collected more information about you than Google. My office wants to know what exactly Google does with all of the information it's gathering.

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.

Facebook is by far the largest of these social networking sites, and starting with its ill-fated Beacon service, privacy concerns have more than once been raised about how the ubiquitous social networking site handles its user data.

When I think about privacy on social media sites, there's kind of the usual suspect problems, which doesn't make them any less important or severe; it's just we kind of know their shape, and we kind of know how we're going to solve them.

We willingly share personal information with companies for the convenience of using their products.

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

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.

Facebook's privacy policies are confusing to many people, and the company has changed them frequently, almost always allowing more information to be exposed in more ways.

As late as 2007, Facebook was still trying to figure out what it wanted to be when it grew up. An advertising space seemed to be the obvious answer, but how that would tap into the massive value of the personal data uploaded to the company every day remained a puzzle.

We get better search results and we see more appropriate advertising when we let Google know who we are.

People complain when ads aren't relevant, and they complain when ads are too relevant.

It's interesting - what are you willing to give up in terms of your privacy for access to other people? For access to things you think you desperately need. Ultimately, it's that old saying, isn't it? If the service is free, then the product is you. The thing being sold is you. There's a product for sale in you and your data.

To be sure, anonymity online has it uses and is very important. Governments hoover up people's telephone and e-mail records without oversight, and companies track astonishingly granular personal information.

Companies are accumulating vast amounts of information about your likes and dislikes. But they are doing this not only because you're interesting. The more they know, the more money they can make.

Anything you care about, from vacation plans to exercise to the best Ethiopian restaurant, is going to be guided by your individual search history.