"The idea that the #10YearChallenge might be a shady astroturfed meme intended to capture innocent user data isn’t so extraordinary, as far as social-media folklore goes."

"There’s a widely held conspiracy theory that Facebook is eavesdropping on conversations through our smartphones — how else, the idea goes, could Facebook serve up advertisements about things I was literally just talking about?...  Facebook doesn’t need to eavesdrop on you: The data it already has and is able to extract continuously... is more than enough....  The breathtaking scope of contemporary surveillance and data-extraction processes doesn’t just make conspiracy theories about astroturfed memes and bugged smartphones seem almost pathetic in comparison. It also reveals how little our own choices are able to control the flow of our data, and how little our knowledge really matters. I might be aware that photos of myself in 2009 could be misused, and choose not to participate in that meme. But simply by living a fairly regular life on and offline — by clicking on links and writing posts; by opening Instagram and scrolling through it, hovering over some photos and flicking past others; by using credit cards at chain stores; by letting photographs of myself be taken and uploaded to the internet — I’m generating data that’s probably more valuable to the companies involved than those photographs would be. There’s something tragic about the fact that the purely recreational activity of participating in a meme is the subject of conspiratorial paranoia, while the multitude of chore-like activities we do daily, from which data is also being extracted for hoarding or sale, go mostly ignored."

From "Facebook Doesn’t Need to Fool You" (New York Magazine)(reacting to "Facebook's '10 Year Challenge' Is Just a Harmless Meme — Right?," which I blogged here yesterday).