Private data security

Would Ad-Free Facebook Really Mean Surveillance-Free Facebook?

As the web has matured from its early utopian academic days into a commercialized surveillance state, human society across the world has been conditioned to accept as fact that the web will be organized as a Faustian bargain in which we trade our digital souls for free information, entertainment and services. In essence we have become a global distributed reality television show in which we all agree to broadcast to advertisers and researchers globally our every action and thought in return for fame, fortune and free stuff. The web, however, did not create the surveillance state, it merely began the practice of "paying" us for the data that was already being taken from us each day by data brokers, while creating an environment to help encourage that transfer. Yet, this past weekend Sheryl Sandberg alluded to the notion of a paid version of Facebook – a concept Zuckerberg did not dispute in his Senate testimony yesterday, in which the upper and middle classes could pay to regain their privacy, while the proletariats face every greater surveillance, profiling and manipulation.