The channels and services of social media that are free to the user generate income by selling advertising space and/or providing user data to advertisers.

 

This means that the social media service customer is not the user but the advertiser. For example, when a person creates a profile on Facebook, they simultaneously give the corporation the right to view and handle their personal information and information on user behaviour, such as actions, locations and likes. It is a question of exchange, where the user provides information about themselves in exchange for the use of a free-of-charge service.

 

A social media service customer is not the user but the advertiser.

Channels like Facebook are free, because they sell to advertisers, in an indirect way, a huge amount of data, which they gather from the users and which enables very powerful tools for advertisement targeting.

As another example, the Google search engine shows the user personalised advertisements based on past searches by the user.

Every once in a while, it is worth discussing why we hand over our personal information to these services.

From time to time, the data collection methods of large corporations become the topic of debate. Users do, however, hand over their information and content for the use of the social media corporation. This handover is a part of the terms and conditions and cannot be relinquished afterwards by campaigns or boycotts.

Still, every once in a while, it is worth discussing why we hand over our personal information to these services. Would it be possible, for example, to limit the right of the corporations to forward private information to other organisations through legislation?