[markyuckerberg]

>> I'd really like to know why it's better for me to have no internet at all than some but not all?

Because under the pretext of giving you internet, Facebook is creating shadow profiles about me.

Now I would like to know why it is more important for you to get stuff for free than my privacy?

All you need to do, of course, is get Facebook to promise me that it won't create these shadow profiles about non-users. At that moment, you should (hopefully) have a little bit of an "aha!".

If that free internet were actually provided by the government, and was funded by taxation, "we the people" (however comical that notion is these days), actually have the legislative and ultimately the executive power to stop our government from doing shady things with that internet. What is your recourse if the same thing is decided behind closed doors inside a corporation? I will answer that question for you based on how these things usually turn out: whatever the corporation eventually agrees to will turn out to be better for them, because it will be worse for their competitors. Think: audit of all data collected, having onerous laws around financial reporting, having to agree with a million different compliance issues etc. At the end of it all, someone will look back on it and wring their hands: "If only the people had been a little wiser and stopped the giant corporation from having their way, things could have been so much better".

Think, for a moment, about the farcical fines these megaliths are facing. If you were an executive at any of these companies, would you actually lose sleep over them? If the fines are not acting as a deterrent, why even bother with the fine? Again, where is your recourse?

I am all for public shaming of FB employees, because if they were to stop counting their bank balance and just look themselves in the mirror for a little bit, they know they have completely earned this shaming.

[dingaling]

Free Basics puts no obligation on its users to visit or use Facebook at all.

They can browse Accuweather, BBC News, Bing, Wikipedia and other localised websites all day long if they please. For free.

[pvaldes]

It seems that facebook saved information also about people without a facebook account each time they visit a web displaying a sort of 'like' buttons so even if you just browse those webs you may be watched and 'classified' by facebook (without agreing with any terms of contract document with facebook).

[thecrazyone]

I think you do agree to a contract when you use free basics

[pvaldes]

We are talking about different things here.

For example, lets suppose that you visit your favourite digital newspaper. After reading an article or a howto you see a "like this article?/was this howto useful?/Send us your feedback" button. It seems (I can't confirm it so I could be wrong, just hear it on the TV news yesterday), that facebook was saving silently all this info about preferences from lots of people that aren't neither facebook users nor visiting facebook forums and webs

If we thing about it, wouldn't be much different than to put a creepy guy near the door of a supermarket recording all that you buy to sell all this info later.

[thecrazyone]

Well, _creep_ _shmeep_ (you're just using an ad hominem) you agreed to it when you signed up to free basics. All activities that FB does is according to their ToS and their privacy policies. If you agreed to that, then they are doing it legitimately.

[markyuckerberg]

>> Free Basics puts no obligation on its users to visit or use Facebook at all.

Here is a list of possible ways Facebook can triangulate information about people who are not active on Facebook even without controlling access to the internet:

1. User telemetry based on your browser when you visit any page which has a Like button

2. If you have ever used WhatsApp and deleted it, seeing who has your phone number on their contacts list

3. If you have ever used WhatsApp and deleted it, seeing who has your phone number on their WhatsApp app

4. Being tagged in a photo (that your friend captured) based on a Facebook account which you don't even actively use

5. Seeing where they tagged you if that info is easy to infer from the image's metadata

6. Seeing where they tagged you based on the check in location

7. Seeing where they tagged you, based on the comment they might leave on the photo

8. Seeing who has your email address on their contacts list and associated a name to it

9. Inferring your name from someone's contacts and matching it to the phone number so that

10. They can check if a second person has the same phone number or same email address under the same name or a small variant.

11. Learning about life events which concern you based on other people's WhatsApp conversations about you since they usually mention you by name

12. Text mining of WhatsApp conversations for a list of names which they don't yet have in their database and possibly inferring the relationship type

Now they basically have a "shadow profile" of a (person's name + phone number) even if that person has never gone near Facebook their entire lives. If there are additional details about you in someone else's contacts, imagine how much easier you just made it for Facebook.

12. If you agree that the shadow profile is fairly easy to create once the apps controlled by FB (FB, Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram) reach a sufficient critical mass, you probably understand that they will collect every piece of information they can and associate it with the right shadow profile.

My guess is, I don't cover a fraction of the techniques they use already (simply because at a certain scale, I bet they identified even bigger patterns that we cannot even see), and the list is already too uncomfortable for someone who doesn't want to have anything to do with Facebook. As a programmer, you probably know that most of these are trivial to implement. Your problem will be "too much noise", definitely not "too little signal". No worries. An eager horde of people are everyday helping Facebook to cut down the noise and increase the signal to noise ratio of their shadow profiles.

Now, imagine what happens when Facebook becomes the primary means to access the internet for an entire region.