I'll let you in on a secret: I hate sharing any of my personal information with any company or person I don't actually know. OK, for the people who know me that's not really a secret, but I still need to put that out there because it's true. I would gladly pay for anything with dollars than data, and that includes Android or Chrome or any of Google's other services. Not because I think my data would be handled better if I were to exchange money, but because I'd rather not share it at all. Having said that, I know that I have to if I want to be able to use products or services that are worth a damn. That's because of the same things that got Facebook into its latest privacy mess. The same data that can be used to allegedly influence voters by lying to them is also used to make life easier through personalization. The difference is not the data itself or how it's being collected; the difference is the company that is doing it and how honest it is. Unfortunately, that's hard to measure, and companies that do snatch up our information are all over the map when it comes to transparency and integrity. I'd rather pay for Android updates with dollars than data, but inevitably the services wouldn't be nearly as good if I could. By now I imagine everyone is tired of hearing about Facebook. Well, too bad because I know me and plenty of other people are never going to stop talking about its practices and why it doesn't deserve your trust. I also won't bother telling anyone to delete Facebook since the people that actually care about what Facebook did and what it will do again if given a chance already did the thing. No number of hashtags or witty sayings will make a difference, nor will being that guy who says "I told you so!" then remarks on how he deleted Facebook before it was cool. But I'll always have plenty to say when it comes to companies that use our data to make their millions, what we get in return, and what we need to know about all of it. I want to start by clearing up some misconceptions about Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. Facebook did not sell your data to anyone, and seeing people who know better claiming it did is disheartening. What Facebook did was worse — it sold access to your data. And because of how Facebook tracks you across its platform and the web itself, it sold access to my data as well even though it doesn't have any of it. That's the most important distinction; Facebook tracks and keeps enough data that if you talk to me and someone else talks to me, it can build a profile on me based on the things we talked about. Then it lets someone else have access to that data without your or my approval.

Facebook isn't the only company that collects huge amounts of data about us each and every day. The elephant in the room here is Google, of course, but every other company that provides a service to you, whether that service is free or paid, also collects data. The amount and type of data can vary; I use Signal for messaging and know it collects some user data, but not nearly as much or as sensitive as the data Google collects. I also use products and services from Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Valve, Ubisoft, and the list goes on and each and every one of them collects user data from me. Some of them are more transparent about what they collect and how than others are, but so far none of them have sunk to the Facebook level of dishonesty about what they have on me and what they plan to do with it.