Published 2012-01-24T19:02:00Z”/>

Sam Kelly

Free on Facebook means that you are free to poke, like and post as you please, but only under the condition that Facebook is free to track, record, analyze and profit from the troves of details and data willfully surrendered by users.

The model used by Facebook is one that is common across the Web. A user agreement containing thousands of words shrouded in airtight legal language is employed to forge a relationship between the site and the user, granting us access to the service and the service access to us.

It can be uncomfortable and disheartening to imagine the infrastructure that holds an unfathomable plethora of seemingly innocuous bits of information about millions of people throughout the world. This is all used to better organize us into specific groups to be targeted for precise messages.

This is concerning and not something many people like, but Chris Faridniya, a senior music industry and technology major, thinks it can be more comforting to think it is a computer program that collects and utilizes the personal information rather than human eyes, he said. There is a lack of understanding about how data is collected and more importantly, how it is analyzed.

“Most people do not know enough about how it’s used,” Faridniya said. “There needs to be a summary of the agreement so you know what you are signing.”

The rub is not necessarily that our information is collected and utilized to provide monetary benefit for the entity collecting and selling it, but, as the cattle, we should at least be able to know when, how and who we are being butchered by. We fit into the equation. We are the commodities that are being herded and sorted after careful analysis of who we are, what we look at, who we talk to and a glut of other personal details once commonly referred to as our private lives.

Jenna Poell, a senior communications studies major, doesn’t think users have much of a choice in regard to giving up personal information on the Internet, she said. It is required that one divulge at least some personal details to gain access to any number of sites and services.

“It kind of pisses me off,” Poell said.

Personal information can grant access to a wide range of interesting, useful, perverted or foolish products and services online. Without carefully monitoring where you spread yourself, it may be learned that bits of you are strewn all about the Web in places you may not want.

Students must be comfortable knowing information is stored and accessed when used as currency online, senior health science major Jessica Gwerder said.

“You are still in control on what details go on there,” she said.

Accessing content for absolutely free is naive, because employees are not volunteers and infrastructures cost money to run. Being digital means that physical things and costs are involved. However, as the growth of Facebook illustrates, identifying users by personal details to further segment them into smaller groups to target is an extraordinarily profitable business model and one that depends on its users willingly divulging personal details.  

As a user of the Internet and a free-stuff enthusiast, I would be taken aback to pay for any of the services I enjoy. I understand my position can seem unreasonable to content providers at times, because I want everything for free, and I want it right now. As a good American capitalist, I certainly support major corporations profiting immensely from a unique product or service that they provide and consumers want.

It is for these reasons I am content, albeit unnerved at times, that I can access an expansive range of products, services and content by surrendering my privacy. Perhaps it is privacy that is changing, and advertising is only adapting to that trend.

This new personal relationship with the Internet will only continue to evolve and expand, but I would at the very least want the relationship to be a bit more formal. Don’t factory-farm us. I would at least like to be afforded the treatment of free-range cattle.

I would like to be free to share what I please with whomever I please. However, I would know exactly who knew what and would not have to share with anyone I did not want to share with.

I would feel as if I owned my personal details once again, and I would be able to nurture a strong, healthy sense of privacy.

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<strong>Sam Kelly can be reached at

</strong> <em>[email protected]</em>