Meta Is Evil

The maxim "If something's free, you aren't the customer, you're the product" has been around for a while. What companies like Meta and Google sell is your attention, and they can ask a fairly high price for it because they can target it so precisely, thanks to the volumes of data they collect on you.

"And as the data trade expands, so too does the tech behind it. What were once chintzy if endearing tabloid-style popups — "Doctors hate him! See how he reversed his age with one weird trick" — have now become hyper-personalized ads crafted and delivered for very specific groups of users, a system called "social media targeting."

Targeted ads on social media are made possible by analyzing four key metrics: your personal info, like gender and age; your interests, like the music you listen to or the comedians you follow; your "off app" behavior, like what websites you browse after watching a YouTube video; and your "psychographics," meaning general trends glossed from your behavior over time, like your social values and lifestyle habits."

Lately Meta got caught deliberately targeting beauty ads to teen girls who had recently deleted selfies, which is tap dancing on the borderline between advertising and psychoengineering.

If you haven't read Careless People, it's worth your while.

About the only place I ever go on Facebook anymore is my own personal timeline, especially because the feed has become a morass of ads interspersed with ragebait arguments. I'm the FB equivalent of the antisocial introverted homebody who doesn't like going to parties, but doesn't mind having friends over to chill.

I tend to leave a browser tab open to my own page. Now, if I leave that tab unattended for any length of time, when I click back on it, it automatically...and without any input from me...pops over to the feed, causing me to have to manually click the back button to get back to my own page. That's dirty pool.

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