[trestacos]

A fundamental part of charles' argument is that in order to sell ads, facebook must encourage you to set your profile settings to public. That's not the case. It doesn't matter whether you've set your profile to fully private - Facebook's privacy settings don't affect whether or not marketers can target you with ads. In fact, in that regard facebook is incented to protect your privacy so that you'll be comfortable putting more information in the site, which they can then use for better targeting. Since marketers don't get specific information about you when you're targeted, your privacy hasn't been breached in doing so.

This doesn't change that people should be very careful about their privacy settings, but the fact that facebook does targeted ads doesn't mean they have incentives to encourage you to make everything you post public.