Comment Re:Because you think Google is any better? (Score 1) 218
Google doesn't (as far as I know) sell user information to advertisers. They exclusively use their own analytics; all an advertiser can do is submit their target demographics and keywords, and let Google do the math.
s/Google/Facebook/ and that's true. Anybody with a Facebook account can create an advertising account and see what any advertiser sees for targeting options. Try it out, it's eye-opening. You can only provide ads to Facebook users through Facebook. Here's one step further from the company's 10-K filing with the SEC:
We generate a substantial majority of our revenue from advertising. The loss of marketers, or reduction in spending by marketers with Facebook, could seriously harm our business. The substantial majority of our revenue is currently generated from third parties advertising on Facebook. For 2013, 2012, and 2011, advertising accounted for 89% , 84% and 85%, respectively, of our revenue.
We generate the substantial majority of our revenue from selling advertising placements to marketers.
In 2013, developers received more than $2.1 billion from transactions enabled by our Payments infrastructure. While mobile applications can also integrate with Facebook, mobile applications do not process transactions using our Payments infrastructure.
(*.3 = 630 million).
If I compare that to Facebook's income statement, that leaves 235 million (3% of revenue) in loose change revenue. So basically, Facebook isn't running around making money except by selling ad placement. Fair disclaimers: I work for Facebook as a backend engineer for nearly a year now. I pulled all these numbers from the publicly available 10-K report.
I think that Facebook has matured into better respecting privacy from its early days through the years before I started there and I'm very happy with seeing how things are treated internally. I'm further certain that the idea of Facebook selling personally identifiable information about its users would massively undermine the point of having an advertising delivery platform. The attitude of everybody I'm around is about trying to make something that enriches the world.