I think this is a terrible headline that masks an interesting philosophical debate. Especially at this community, we feel we intuitively understand that we get the convenience and social value from Facebook for $0, and we pay in our personal data they use to serve up advertisements. That to me is hardly newsworthy and a relatively uninteresting piece.
But- there is an interesting question in what is an appropriate use of our personal data w.r.t credit ratings, financial decisions, etc... Just like there are anti-discrimination laws that prevent mortgage servicers from altering policies based on race, perhaps there should be other walls to keep separate how our data can be used financially.
This is a question the NY Times should've posed instead of this clearly linkbaity uninteresting headline.
Maybe a little SciFi sounding but I can imagine in the near future there becoming a market for obscuring a person's search and online social behaviour results. With the proper attention paid to timing and location, it would be a fairly simple matter to blur realities between who a person is and what a program has randomly searched for: e.g. provide your login details to a program that spends the next couple of years inserting random data on your behalf.
This was also my immediate reaction, agreed. I wrote an article a while ago that talks about a similar thing, but concludes more along those lines - facebook offers us the service for free, and as far as we know they do not sell our personal data. Until they do, we don't need to worry.
NYT's target audience is not HN. I think many people who use FB don't realise there are any privacy issues under consideration, and I think it's good that the NYT is pointing them out.
While I'd expect most HNers to have made a conscious choice whether to trade their data for FB service or not, that's not something I expect regular users to do (I think they should, but that's another matter).
But- there is an interesting question in what is an appropriate use of our personal data w.r.t credit ratings, financial decisions, etc... Just like there are anti-discrimination laws that prevent mortgage servicers from altering policies based on race, perhaps there should be other walls to keep separate how our data can be used financially.
This is a question the NY Times should've posed instead of this clearly linkbaity uninteresting headline.