The Political Economy of Privacy on Facebook: Article Summary

Facebook is watching everything its users are doing. It uses your information to collect data to sell to advertising in order to make profit. The article introduces the idea of a prosumer. A Prosumer is the progressive blurring of the line that separates producer from consumer. Alvin Toffler describes the age of prosumption as the arrival of a new form of economic and political democracy, self-determined work, labor autonomy, local production, and autonomous self-production. New media corporations do not pay users for the production of content. However, a widely used accumulation strategy is to give the users free access to services and platforms, let them produce content, and to accumulate a mass of prosumers that are sold as commodity to advertisers. There is no product sold to the users. Instead, the users are sold as commodities to advertisers. The more users a platform claims, the higher the advertising rates.

Facebook closely monitors your contacts, communication, and data. They then sell this data to companies, who then send targeted advertisements to you. This is how Facebook exists, all users are examples of workers for Facebook. The users who upload photos and images, write wall posting and comments, send mail to their contacts, accumulate friends, or browse other profiles on Facebook constitute an audience commodity that is sold to advertisers. On the internet, users are also content producers who engage in permanent creative activity, communication, community building, and content-production. Surveillance of Facebook prosumers occurs via corporate web platform operators and third party advertising clients, which continuously monitor and record personal data and online activities. Facebook surveillance creates detailed user profiles so that advertising clients know and can target the personal interests and online behaviors of the users. Facebook sells their prosumers as a commodity to advertising clients.

Data surveillance is the means for Facebook’s economic ends. Facebook permanently monitors users for economic ends, which means that no economic privacy is guaranteed to them. Since it remains unknown to users what specific information and data contributes to targeted advertising, they cannot control their data use or protect themselves from its commodification. The use of targeted advertising and economic surveillance is legally guaranteed by Facebook’s privacy policy. However, users cannot control what Facebook uses to attract advertisers, therefore it morally questions their practices as a company.