When Facebook launched, it dove headfirst into a brave new world. No one knew that the cost of connecting people all over the world for ad revenue was eventually going to be Cambridge Analytica.
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.
Facebook and Google are battling over who will be our gateway to the rest of the Internet through 'like' buttons and universal logins - giving them huge power over our online identities and activities.
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.
You happily give Facebook terabytes of structured data about yourself, content with the implicit tradeoff that Facebook is going to give you a social service that makes your life better.
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).
At WhatsApp, our engineers spend all their time fixing bugs, adding new features and ironing out all the little intricacies in our task of bringing rich, affordable, reliable messaging to every phone in the world. That's our product, and that's our passion. Your data isn't even in the picture. We are simply not interested in any of it.
We get more data about people than any other data company gets about people, about anything - and it's not even close. We're looking at what you know, what you don't know, how you learn best. The big difference between us and other big data companies is that we're not ever marketing your data to a third party for any reason.
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.
What I try to focus on is not to try to stop the march of technological progress. Instead, I try to run faster. If Amazon knows you better than you know yourself, then the game is up.
If you have a weakness for furry slippers or something, you might end up with that kind of advertising. It's a very complicated algorithmic decision. There's no one dude who's deciding what ads are going with things, and it's very individualized also. And that's the idea of collecting information is that in theory, you're showing people things that they should want to see or for which they are a good target. So, no, there's no master person.
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.
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.
Apple and Google will compete like crazy for our data because once they have it we'll be their customers forever.
I'm speaking to you from Silicon Valley, where some of the most prominent and successful companies have built their businesses by lulling their customers into complacency about their personal information. They're gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it. We think that's wrong. And it's not the kind of company that Apple wants to be.
I was very taken aback and disappointed in Sheryl Sandberg's public statement that if an individual did not want to continue to share their data with FB they would have to pay. To me, that sounds like a threat. Continue to let us use your property or pay?
Since the beginning of the internet era, it has been pretty widely accepted that when you join an online service, whatever data you put into it belongs to you.
Every time you click on a like button on another site, you've told Facebook that you're doing that. And so therefore advertisers know who their fan base is.
These days, tales of what Facebook did with its users during the singularity are commonly used to scare naughty children in Wales.
What is clear is that users own their data and should have control of how their data is used.
If I sign up for Facebook and want my account destroyed, it is impossible. They keep tabs on you; there will always be a trace.
When you sign up for Facebook, the service first searches for any mentions of your name and suggests you befriend anyone who has mentioned you in their posts. It then asks to access your e-mail account so you can connect with anyone with whom you regularly correspond.
Brave plays the long game on behalf of users first, and also publishers, to win a better Web with fast, safe browsing, anonymous micropayments, and user control over data.
No one ever complained about Facebook for a single day until Donald Trump was president.
The very first plan I wrote for MySpace was that it would be a portal, but a portal wrapped around your user profile.
