Fulk said:
I thought that FB was a data-mining operation that makes vast amounts of money by selling that data to anyone and everyone who can afford to pay for it, masquerading as:
just a medium for communication
.
That's pretty much spot on; they're using the bait of convenience to draw the masses in so they can gather reams of data to create a profile that can be sold to advertisers, political parties, shady "research" organisations, whoever. Look at the Cambridge Analytics scandal, and FB's response to that - they were pleading ignorance of what was going on but The Register outright accused them of lying about what they knew and more significantly, what they themselves do with data. Facebook did not sue for libel, nor to the best of my knowledge have they to date taken any sort of action against El Reg.
Basically, Facebook has taken over from religion as "the opium of the masses" for a large chunk of the population, feeding them their news, their social lives, things to feel good about, things to get irate about. There is a price for convenience, and where FB are concerned it's one I'm not willing to pay - before anyone starts going on about other tracking, my browser is set up to block as much of it as I can get away with, and the information you can get from the blocking tools is quite an eye-opener as to how much is going on behind the scenes.