On Facebook they have decided that it is time to start answering some difficult questions , or at least that is what they mean. The company has published in detail exactly what information about us Facebook advertisers know .

In the announcement they have tried to deny in various ways that for the company the users are the product, but it is enough to read in detail and not fall into the puns to realize how ridiculous some of their arguments are, as that the business of Facebook is simply to connect with other people and serve as a source of news and information, totally minimizing your advertising business of billions of dollars .

If something was clear after Mark Zuckerberg answered questions in front of the United States Congress, it is that nobody has anything clear when it comes to the social network and how they handle our information.

Zuckerberg has already contradicted himself by trying to answer whether or not they sell data to advertisers about users, saying that their own data was sold to third parties. However, Facebook continues to ensure that they do not sell your information to anyone.

“Our business is social networks”

The most ridiculous thing about the whole note is that they answer the question “If I’m not paying for Facebook, am I the product?” with a resounding “No”. They claim that their business is “social networks and the ability to connect with the people you care about wherever you are in the world.” Something that sounds a little like Facebook’s business is mainly to be good people and improve your life .

Then they continue to compare themselves with a free search engine : “Our basic product is to read news and find information, the ads exist to finance that experience”.

Facebook wants to pretend that the use they make of their users’ information to attract advertisers is not problematic because they do not sell it directly.

Facebook explains in detail all the ways in which advertisers can reach you through Facebook ads. They clearly accept that information about all your Facebook use is offered to advertisers in reports so that they know who sees their advertising.

They explain how they compare the information they already have about you with the ones advertisers offer them, and explain how websites you visit and apps that you use that are not even from Facebook also send information to Facebook to further improve the advertising they offer.

Facebook at all times tries to make it appear that none of this is problematic because advertisers can not identify you individually nor do they directly sell or share that information with them. But obviously they use everything to sell better advertising and thus attract more advertisers who know that Facebook is where they best know people thanks to all the information they collect.

Facebook may not have sold the data as such, but the fact that they can use that data to attract advertisers and sell personalized advertising is still an information marketing, your information, your product . If the Facebook business is the news, then they are doing a terrible job promoting false news .

“We do what they do on TV, radio or newspapers”

Facebook was basically compared to a media outlet that offers information and survives on the basis of advertising , which is not the case. Facebook is an advertising company that in 2017 obtained a net profit of almost 16,000 million dollars .

If Facebook’s profits are coming mainly from exploiting the information they have managed to collect from their hundreds of millions of users, how come those users are not the product?

Facebook does not generate information, its users do it. Facebook does not generate news, its users do it and the social network uses its defective algorithms and that nobody understands very well how they work, to decide who sees that information, who is more interested, and how to keep the user hooked on the platform by investing more time inside.

They have already tried to convince us that the more we share, the happier we will be . The more information we voluntarily leave on your social network, the better our experience on Facebook will be. This information will be used to sell the most personalized advertising possible and so that advertisers can more accurately reach customers with more potential.

Facebook wants to imply that they sell advertising just as they sell it on television or in the press. But on Facebook they make money selling your attention to advertisers based on what they know about you, not based on some content that they generate and have an audience, as TV, the press and other media do.

Already other prominent figures in the world of technology have pointed out, Steve Wozniak recently closed his Facebook account precisely because he thinks you are the product: users provide every detail of his life to Facebook and … Facebok earns a lot of advertising money with it . ”

Tim Cook came to say in relation to Facebook that Apple made money with good products and not with their customers. And, the same Zuckerberg may have opened the door to a Facebook of payment as a price for privacy.

But Facebook still wants to pretend that its multi-million dollar business does not rely entirely on the huge amounts of personal information it has collected from its users in its 14 years of existence. To repeat that lie a thousand times will not make it a reality.