Social Networking: A Purposeful Loss of Privacy

Social Networking: A Purposeful Loss of Privacy

Social media started as an entertainment tool and evolved to a powerful marketing tool. While serving its primary purpose of connecting people, social media also plays a major role in connecting marketers with customers. According to statisa.com, in 2017, social media advertising revenue would amount to a total of 41 billion U.S. dollars, up from 17.85 billion in 2014. According to a 2016 estimate, Facebook and Twitter together hold nearly three quarter of the social media ad market. Facebook is the leading social network in the world, and the most used social network for marketing proposes. In the most recently reported year 2017, the social network Facebook generated 39.94 billion U.S. dollars in ad revenues.

I don’t know about you guys but once I seen just how much Facebook is generating in ad revenues annually it threw me off... I mean we are talking about several billions here!! So the question stands...How in the Facebook are they making so much money? With more than 1 billion dollars per quarter in advertising revenue, Facebook uses target advertising. Facebook commodifies and trades user data and user behavior data then sells it to advertising clients. The truth is most users don't know what kind of information about them is used for advertising purposes. Rarely almost never are Users asked if they agree to the use of advertising on the Internet. Not to mention if Facebook is getting paid to collect our information shouldn’t we get paid for giving them content to sell in the first place? Is this a direct violation of privacy? In my paper i plan on exploring the economic and sociological perspective of this topic, out weighing the pros and cons what people are saying about their private information being sold to marketers and advertisers on these social.