$$$$The Character Flaw$$$ or is it?

Before there's an IPO, private shares are distributed at an artificially low price to insiders who sell when the stock shoots up opening day.

According to his roommate at the time, Arie Hasit, "he built the site for fun."

"We had books called Face Books, which included the names and pictures of everyone who lived in the student dorms.  At first, he built a site and placed two pictures, or pictures of two males and two females.  Visitors to the site had to choose who was 'hotter' and according to the votes there would be a ranking."

Gotta give the guy credit.  He exponentially monetized the high school experience.

Television king pins used to justify the inanity of commercials by saying, "They underwrite the show."  Okay, we accepted that unwritten compact. 

Now, in exchange for all our personal information including search words, proclivities, likes, dislikes, politics, financials, private thoughts, all that makes us human and exposed to prosecution and persecution, we get to write inane comments and devalue the terms "friend" and "like". 

The value of your personal information to many parties (advertisers, government enforcers, criminals, etc.) stomps like an elephant on your ephemera that lasts forever.

That unwritten contract between the consumer and the Internet will come back to bite you in the ass.  Unless, of course, you have some of those magic shares.

PRIVACY IS LIKE NEVER DYING: YOU PRETEND IT EXISTS

Geez, it's creepy to see some of the microniche ads placed next to my Gmail account. I don't go on FB much so I haven't focused heartily on those. Obviously some entity, whether it's supposed to be an inhuman algorithm or a handrubbing Peter Lorre type, is reading my gmail and selecting ads for me personally (O Joy!) based on what I sent to another individual. Is it supposed to make it less of an invasion by having the data collection and analysis done by something impersonal? (Of course, you don't know if it's impersonal. If the coin of the realm is information, then Google and FB have the Midas touch.)

So much of monetizing the Internet (in other words, selling ads) is based on the pretense that what citizens write is private. But of course it isn't. So the companies profiting pretend and give lip service to the notion of privacy and encourage their supplicants to believe in it when they know full well that all their thoughts and dreams are accessible, marketable and blackmailable. Knowledge that nothing is private is like knowledge that we're going to die. You push it into the back of your mind and try to forget the inevitable but sooner or later it's going to bite you on the ass.