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Home / Whanganui Chronicle

Editorial: What Facebook knows about you

By Simon Waters
Whanganui Chronicle·
20 Apr, 2017 01:07 AM2 mins to read

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SOME years back the US Government threatened to break up Microsoft.

The tech giant had embedded its Internet Explorer web browser into its latest edition of Windows and pretty much stifled the competition.

Netscape was a casualty.

Because Microsoft was so dominant back then - 95 per cent of computers ran Windows - there was genuine concern that the company had too much power.

Fast forward 20-ish years and today one wonders how big Facebook will need to get before it faces a similar threat.

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Latest studies suggest that most - ie over half of people - get their daily news from Facebook. News others produce by the way. This has sent not just old media but even new media scrambling for their calculators as their revenues plummet.

Unlike Google, or You Tube, Facebook does not support its content providers with a cut of the billions of advertising dollars it earns off the back of content it does not pay for.

Pretty smart cookie that Mark Zuckerberg bloke.

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But it's not just news Facebook is dominating.

Where the crowds are, advertisers follow. Where once you texted, more now use Facebook Messenger. And why not, it's free.

Facebook is set to eat You Tube as the number one video platform too, and it's livestreaming makes tv stations out of us all. Even, sadly, live-streaming killers as happened this tragic Easter weekend in the USA.

I'm not arguing that old business models don't need a shake-up once in a while, but so many sectors are being supplanted by one single corporate that now knows more about you than your own mother.

Apparently it's artificial intelligence can now tell your political persuasion, sexuality, beliefs and much more simply from profiles based on what you click. You don't have to volunteer a single thing about yourself.

So when is too big, too powerful, too all-knowing?

You be the judge.

Meantime as Bette Davis once said "Buckle your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy ride".

Welcome to the Facebook revolution.

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