[craigsmansion]

> what is the big deal with companies e.g. Facebook and Google using your data for profit?

Obviously I can only answer this conclusively for one person, but it's de-humanising. It turns your online life, which is increasingly becoming a larger part of many people's normal life, into a Truman show; you--with your ups and downs and whereabouts, become a hapless player in a ruthless monetising game of which the goal is to siphon agency of your own life away from you.

Others might have their own reasons

> These companies provide services that you, a user of their platforms, want.

Want, but might not want at all cost. If enough users do not want to pay the asking price, some of these companies might revisit their race to the bottom approach. Some of them existed and were profitable before tracking become big and pervasive.

> Providing those services is not free

No, but being profitable is not a concern that overrides everything else. Maybe for the company it is, but a society has every right to say, "You can be as profitable as you want within these confines."

[komali2]

>Obviously I can only answer this conclusively for one person, but it's de-humanising. It turns your online life, which is increasingly becoming a larger part of many people's normal life, into a Truman show; you--with your ups and downs and whereabouts, become a hapless player in a ruthless monetising game of which the goal is to siphon agency of your own life away from you.

But what does this mean functionally?

I don't mean to disparage your argument, but I've never been able to get a clear answer on actual pain points from Facebook data mongering, answers are always some variation of above, which I take to mean "it's icky, I dunno, it's just icky."

[intended]

The idea of the market itself is based on things like that: there’s no reason to value a shiny yellow metal, but we do.

Practically, this is centralization of information and it’s sale which is enabling people to target and herd ideas and behaviors in ways we do not have responses to.

Not that this is very new as a phenomenon! But the tools available today allow this to be mechanized.

So where artisanal bakers would have to make campaigns and do all of the data gathering and follow up work on their own, we’ve now made factories to do this.

Since essentially we are talking about collective concepts, consent and beliefs being influenced in an automated manner, this is “different” than what has come before.

[plankers]

For me, the major pain point is in what this means for our cultural values around privacy. The less privacy we have the less important privacy becomes, and our collective values around privacy become eroded. This makes it much harder to raise a fuss about privacy violations and have people take you seriously e.g. they might interpret your objections as "it's icky, I don't like it."

If somebody can put better words to this, please do. I'm not well-versed in Sociological Things.