Facebook says, 'Privacy is theft,' because they're selling your lack of privacy to the advertisers who might show up one day.
Interpretation
The quote highlights how companies profit from user data by compromising privacy.
Jaron Lanier is emphasizing the paradox of social media platforms like Facebook, which assert that privacy is a form of theft. This statement suggests that the commodification of personal data is intrinsic to their business model; by exploiting the lack of user privacy, these companies are essentially 'selling' individuals to advertisers, turning private information into profit at the cost of personal autonomy.
In practice
In a discussion about digital privacy during a technology conference.
Pop culture has entered into a nostalgic malaise. Online culture is dominated by trivial mashups of the culture that existed before the onset of mashups, and by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media. It is a culture of reaction without action.
We're losing track of the vastness of the potential for computer science. We really have to revive the beautiful intellectual joy of it, as opposed to the business potential.
Separation anxiety is assuaged by constant connection. Young people announce every detail of their lives on services like Twitter not to show off, but to avoid the closed door at bedtime, the empty room, the screaming vacuum of an isolated mind.
Web 2.0 ideas have a chirpy, cheerful rhetoric to them, but I think they consistently express a profound pessimism about humans, human nature and the human future.
I mean, you can't have advertising be the only official business of the information economy if the information economy is going to take over.
When you have a global mush, people lose their identity, they become pseudonyms, they have no investment and no consequence in what they do.
Part of the inhumanity of the computer is that, once it is competently programmed and working smoothly, it is completely honest.
If you write a blog post, you've got something to say; you're not just creating words and synonyms. We'd like the computers to actually pick up on that semantic meaning.
The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.
Overregulation stifles creativity. It smothers innovation. It gives dinosaurs a veto over the future. It wastes the extraordinary opportunity for a democratic creativity that digital technology enables.
Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!
I'm struck by the insidious, computer-driven tendency to take things out of the domain of muscular activity and put them into the domain of mental activity.
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