Evgeny Morozov Quotes

In the digital universe, our personal history and its sense of narrative is succeeded by our social networking profile - a snapshot of the current moment. The information itself - our social graph of friends and likes - is a product being sold to market researchers in order to better predict and guide our futures.

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

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.

Over the years, the Internet has been going down the path of becoming a more personalized experience.

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.

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

Marketers use big data profiling to predict who is about to get pregnant, who is likely to buy a new car, and who is about to change sexual orientations. That's how they know what ads to send to whom. The NSA, meanwhile, wants to know who is likely to commit an act of terrorism - and for this, they need us.

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.

If I'm reading my Facebook feed, it's using algorithms, procedures, and methods to give me what I want, or what it thinks that I want, or what suits its business plan.

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.

I log on and there are so many cookies embedded in my computer - it's like they know what I need before I do.

I wonder which is ultimately more creepy: shopping at Amazon or using Facebook?

Facebook collects a lot of data from people and admits it. And it also collects data which isn't admitted. And Google does too. As for Microsoft, I don't know. But I do know that Windows has features that send data about the user.

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.

Call it a hunch, but I sense that many of us are not entirely comfortable with a world in which every single thing we buy creates a cloud of data. I'd like to have an option to not have a record of how much I tipped, or what I bought at 1:08 A.M. at a corner market in New York City.

Everyone knows, or should know, that everything we type on our computers or say into our cell phones is being disseminated throughout the datasphere. And most of it is recorded and parsed by big data servers. Why do you think Gmail and Facebook are free? You think they're corporate gifts? We pay with our data.

Facebook has never been merely a social platform. Rather, it exploits our social interactions the way a Tupperware party does. Facebook does not exist to help us make friends, but to turn our network of connections, brand preferences and activities over time - our 'social graphs' - into money for others.

There is a calculus, it turns out, for mastering our subconscious urges. For companies like Target, the exhaustive rendering of our conscious and unconscious patterns into data sets and algorithms has revolutionized what they know about us and, therefore, how precisely they can sell.

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.

The true end users of Facebook are the marketers who want to reach and influence us. They are Facebook's paying customers; we are the product. And we are its workers. The countless hours that we - and the young, particularly - spend on our profiles are the unpaid labor on which Facebook justifies its stock valuation.

Everything you do on Facebook will affect what comes in your view in the future. If you like crappy things that you don't care about, you'll see more crappy brands that you don't care about in the future, and it might even affect your experiences when you walk into bars, churches, schools, shopping malls, etc.

What's really going on is, on your iPhone, you have 200 apps, and they're all collecting a little data on you. Twitter knows a certain thing, Foursquare knows something else, my Fitbit app knows something else, my Waze app knows something else.

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).

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.