Meta keeps a profile on you even if you’re not a user. They mine data from your friends, family, and colleagues to learn who you are. If anyone you know has you in their phone contacts, and if they’ve given apps like Messenger or Whatsapp access to their contacts, then you already have a secret Meta account.

https://www.vox.com/2018/4/20/17254312/facebook-shadow-profiles-data-collection-non-users-mark-zuckerberg

Why does Meta want to gather data on non users? Because this information is valuable for data on social engineering. Social engineering includes advertising, influencing people to make purchases in both direct and in subtle ways. But it also includes political campaigning, and the efforts of industry giants to influence people in certain directions.

Maybe car companies want you driving bigger and more expensive cars. Maybe fossil fuel companies want you to form positive associations with the idea of gas stoves. Maybe Israel wants you exposed to pro-IDF memes on your social media. Maybe the US government wants you to respect the law and ignore covid.

This data is a tool that tells organisations how to make subtle changes that influence populations. If you have access to enough information, you can run scientific experiments to see what random changes influence people’s behaviour. Then you figure out how to make those changes less random, and more controlled. Meta has already gotten in trouble for running exactly these experiments.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/us/politics/cambridge-analytica-scandal-fallout.html

In a companion piece, The Times reported that people at Cambridge Analytica and its British affiliate, the SCL Group, were in contact with executives from Lukoil, the Kremlin-linked oil giant, as Cambridge built its Facebook-derived profiles. Lukoil was interested in the ways data was used to target American voters, according to two former company insiders. SCL and Lukoil denied that the talks were political in nature and said the oil giant never became a client.

Democrats looking into Russian interference in the 2016 election — already interested in Cambridge’s role in providing analytics to the Trump campaign — said they would seek an investigation into the leak. They were echoed by lawmakers in Britain investigating Cambridge Analytica’s role in disinformation and the country’s referendum to leave the European Union.

Meta has been using the internet to influence the government and control the laws you live under, no matter what part of the world you’re from.

Meta has been ruining the internet long enough. It’s time the internet told them to shut up and go away