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.
The combination of human skills with technology will always be at the root of any solution to the future of making clothes.
The internet, Facebook and Twitter have created mass communications and social spaces that regimes cannot control.
You have to combine both things: invention and innovation focus, plus the company that can commercialize things and get them to people.
Quantum computation is a distinctively new way of harnessing nature. It will be the first technology that allows useful tasks to be performed in collaboration between parallel universes.
The idea that Bill Gates (one of the founders of Microsoft) has appeared like a knight in shining armour to lead all customers out of a mire of technological chaos neatly ignores the fact that it was he, by peddling second rate technology, led them into it in the first place...
Maybe it's naive to say, but it almost seems like, in the past, people tried to sell you something you would actually need, like a hammer or a broom or a toothbrush. But now there's this notion that they can sell you anything. And all they have to do is convince you that you need it.
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