You Are Being Monetized

From Forbes:

With Tuesday’s announcement of Graph Search, Facebook has confirmed what we’ve known all along: we users aren’t there to enjoy content as much as we are the content. That means we’re the products it intends to monetize. . . .

We are the product on Facebook, and the platform’s very premise depends on our willingness to share our lives openly (there’s lots of theology on why we should reveal everything about ourselves online, though it’s usually written by people who do no such thing). Graph Search will eventually provide more pages for advertising, perhaps ever-better keyed to whatever it is we’re searching for. Maybe brands will be given a way to crap out the results with sponsored links, so it could get even worse than all those recommendations you get now from friends who made the mistake of clicking on something. I’d bet on ads running down the sides of every page, too. . . .