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canopic jug [soylentnews.org] writes:

Cory Doctorow has written a column article in which he analyzes the motives for Facebook as an example of surveillance capitalism. With the enormous trove of personal data both raw and interpreted whole populations can be used for blackmail, identity theft, and political manipulation. The profit margins are small however and he likens the process to recovering oil from used, oily rags.

It’s as though Mark Zuckerberg woke up one morning and realized that the oily rags he’d been accumulating in his garage could be refined for an extremely low-grade, low-value crude oil. No one would pay very much for this oil, but there were a lot of oily rags, and provided no one asked him to pay for the inevitable horrific fires that would result from filling the world’s garages with oily rags, he could turn a tidy profit.

[...] That’s because dossiers on billions of people hold the power to wreak almost unimaginable harm, and yet, each dossier brings in just a few dollars a year. For commercial surveillance to be cost effective, it has to socialize all the risks associated with mass surveillance and privatize all the gains.

[...] Facebook doesn’t have a mind-control problem, it has a corruption problem. Cambridge Analytica didn’t convince decent people to become racists; they convinced racists to become voters.

From Locus : Cory Doctorow: Zuck’s Empire of Oily Rags [locusmag.com]

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