Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: nextdoor.com?

[Lyle Scheer (wonko]

Facebook, google, apple, amazon, nextdoor...

All of these companies are making money off of you.  They do it in
different ways.  Generally Apple and Amazon want to sell you devices or
goods.  Facebook and google want to sell your personal information to
advertisers (while in theory protecting your privacy... ie, they don't
attach your name to it... however, there have been multiple studies
showing how your online information "fingerprint" can be used to
identify you, and that's what they sell to anyone who wants to buy it)

I'm guessing nextdoor is similar to Facebook in that it's selling your
profile to advertisers.  This is why I don't use google for mail and
keep my information minimal on sites like Facebook, Nextdoor, or even
Linkedin.... and I never cross-pollinate the information trail (ie, sign
in my facebook signin on nextdoor... that allows nextdoor to access my
facebook internal profile)... I create a unique account.

Generally I find Amazon and Apple less odious than the others, because
they're not using my profile or information to sell to advertisers...
however, I find their techniques to lock me in to their ecosystem
grating and do my best to deliberately foil them at every step.

Still, I have accounts on all of these places as they do provide some
use.... I'm just careful what I feed them.

- Lyle


On 1/5/16 7:44 AM, Diana Carroll wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 5, 2016 at 9:23 AM, Ann Zabaldo <zabaldo [at] earthlink.net> 
> wrote:
>
>> Because a social platform is “for profit” doesn’t automatically make it
>> suspect as your posting implies.
>
> Actually I think it does.  Doesn't make it BAD...but should make you pause
> and ask yourself: what is their business model? How do they make money?
> Because if they are for-profit, they have to make money *somehow*.
>
> You mention FaceBook, which is fair.  The answer is that Facebook makes
> money in numerous ways, most obviously selling advertising which FB users
> will see...but that is not the ONLY way they make money, and advertising is
> not the only way websites (even "free" ones) make money.  Some ways are
> more insidious -- for instance, one way is gathering email addresses and
> demographic information to sell to third parties, which might be legit
> advertisers but not on the actual website but others...or might be spam.
> Whether that's ok or not is a personal decision, but it's worth thinking
> about...and tagging all for-profit sites as "suspect" is really just a
> reminder to ask yourself and your members that question: is the way this
> site makes money ok with us?
>
> (You can usually get an idea of how they make money by viewing their terms
> of service.  Often selling email is mentioned with a phrase such as "we may
> provide your individual information to our marketing partners".)
>
> Diana
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