Facebook is totally free for everyone to use considering the amazing piece of technology and hundreds of hours of hard work that’s gone into making the service however, the company behind the service is a for-profit organization and you might have wondered despite being free, why are they so rich with their CEO amassing billions of dollars in net worth or maybe you’ve asked yourself “How do Facebook make money?”

Well the company sell your data in exchange for ads money. That’s the simplest way to put it. You share data about yourself on Facebook everyday. You write about your location, what you ate last night, your favorite person, your date of birth even your health issues and religious/political affiliation and all of that is harvested and used to retarget advertisements towards you.

This might be god or bad depending on how you see it but if you think about it from an average users’ perspective, you might have wondered that “I’m not affected in any way” which might be true but it depends on what you mean by “Hurt”

Back in 2018, the social network giant landed itself in a hot mess when a firm it was dealing with had reported used data harvested from the platform to manipulate election decisions which might be a bad thing considering the fact that this platform has amass so much power it can affect elections in countries.

Initially, a service that started off as a basic way for sharing picture of yourself and connecting with old friends you went to college with has now become a strong political tool and there is no going back from it because the internet is here to stay.

But let’s not deviate from the subject matter – privacy!! Now let’s face the fact, Facebook isn’t the only company that requires your data in order to well target you better with ads. Google and a bunch of other advertisement companies out there do the same and that’s the fact.

One thing that’s made Google so successful with its search engine is it’s data farm. The Google AdSense is so notorious to the point that numerous experiments were done to know whether the service listens to whatever you say, see what you do and many more because each websites you visit, each search you make all tell about you, your location, personality, needs and wants at that particular time and so forth.

If you put the Google Assistant beside Siri, the former ousts the latter hands down because the number of data Google had about it’s billions of users everyday is tremendous.

Apple on the other hand had positioned itself as the safe and privacy-focused tech firm because it’s not a social networking service. It makes its sales by selling products and other premium services such as its music streaming and a bunch of other media services like the new Fitness Plus.

Facebook on the other hand doesn’t directly sell any product – VR isn’t as big in the consumers market compared to smartphones.

Its flagship service Facebook social network is entirely free so it needs to make money via ads and the ads needs to be done right in other for its partners to continue pumping in their billions into the business as they’re obviously seeing results.

But the current issue between Facebook and Apple whereby the latter has released an update in its iOS 14 operating system for iPhones which allows users to enable what they want other apps to know about thtem.

This is definitely a bad news for a company like Facebook and even Google even though Facebook’s case is much more dependent on the user allowing the service or not to target some vital information about them such as their location, their device’s camera or microphone and so forth.

Apple doesn’t seems to be changing its stance on this issue because it needed to appeal to its customers that its devices are safe and privacy-focused while Facebook will need to appease its ads partners in order to continue raking in the billions because being unable to target a large majority of its userbase will have a dent on its ads revenue.

Privacy is still a big issue with the usage of Facebook and the company has landed itself in a giant antitrust lawsuit which concerns its monopolistic approach to the social networking industry and Mark Zuckerberg’s determination of refusing to ever backdown from his stance and that will continue to be an issue to deal with because big-tech companies don’t directly have the interest of people at heart – just the billions!