Facebook thought your data had a specific dollar value, despite the fact that the company says it never directly sells your personal information.
That's what documents released by the UK Parliament on Wednesday appear to reveal, muddying Facebook's frequent claim that it simply uses your data to sell advertisements.
Facebook has responded in a statement reiterating that it has never sold access to user data. Privacy experts aren't having it.
"Facebook considers advertisers and developers its customers, not its users," said Fatemeh Khatibloo, an analyst at Forrester who focuses on user privacy. "User privacy and transparency will always take a backseat to platform monetization."
It's one more reason to remember that your privacy is not the first priority of tech companies. Instead, profits come first. That shouldn't be a surprise to anyone anymore. It's been staring us in the face for ages.
Forget the fact that Facebook already underwent a catastrophic privacy crisis earlier this year when reports revealed data on 87 million Facebook users wound up in the hands of political consultancy Cambridge Analytica. Top tech execs have been telling us for nearly two decades that privacy is dead.
It's been almost nine years to the day since Google's then-CEO Eric Schmidt made it clear that tech companies aren't going to shy away from collecting and monetizing your data, saying, "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.
