Pigging out
WhatsApp has made major changes to its privacy policy, signalling the monetisation of this messaging network
There’s a classic cartoon that depicts two pigs living it up in a sty while being fattened for the slaughter.
One says to the other: “I don’t know what they’re selling here but the food is great.”
You often hear this analogy about social media: much like the pig, you, the user, have become the product.
This is especially true for Facebook, which now has 1.71bn users.
For Facebook, our value lies in our personal tastes — the movies we like, TV shows we watch, brands we admire, company pages we like, kinds of videos we prefer, places we tend to visit. All this makes up the personal data we share with social media networks, in exchange for using those networks for free.
Facebook is a vastly complex operation, requiring tens of thousands of servers in data centres around the world to let us scroll down a page of posts.
It is, after all, a business. And it is a business that makes its money from selling advertising. This advertising is more accurately sold — and more highly prized — when there is an abundance of personal data to mine.
Last week the pig joke seemed particularly apt as news broke that messaging service WhatsApp (owned by Facebook) is going to start giving businesses access to its millions of users. And it will share users’ names and numbers with Facebook.
In a disturbing manner that is now typical of Facebook, it made the announcement without consulting its users — despite a 2012 agreement with the US Federal Trade Commission that it wouldn’t make changes to privacy without such consultation.
Opting out of sharing your details with Facebook is easily solved (see Settings > Account). But preventing Facebook from monetising WhatsApp — for which it paid US$19bn two years ago — is going to be a lot harder. It’s inevitable that WhatsApp will be turned into a revenue generator.
I’d gladly have paid the $1 WhatsApp usage fee to avoid seeing adverts in the app itself, but that option has been taken away.
But is it a bad thing to receive messages from businesses? Sometimes timeous and useful