There’s a classic cartoon that depicts two pigs living it up in a sty while being fattened for the slaughter. One says to the other: "I don’t know what they’re selling here but the food is great." You often hear this analogy about social media: much like the pig, you, the user, have become the product. This is especially true for Facebook, which now has 1.71bn users. For Facebook, our value lies in our personal tastes — the movies we like, TV shows we watch, brands we admire, company pages we like, kinds of videos we prefer, places we tend to visit. All this makes up the personal data we share with social media networks, in exchange for using those networks for free. Facebook is a vastly complex operation, requiring tens of thousands of servers in data centres around the world to let us scroll down a page of posts. It is, after all, a business. And it is a business that makes its money from selling advertising. This advertising is more accurately sold — and more highly prized — when...
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