Don't sell yourself short, you're worth more than that, I believe in you... being able to generate tracking data worth more than that.
Nobody is forcing anyone, you are free to not use the service at any time.
What they're doing is turning it into an explicitly paid sevice, and letting you choose whether you'd rather pay in money, or in personal data.
In an ideal world, everyone would have the option to decide getting their personal data gathered, or not, in exchange for some money/crypto, with competing data gatherers offering different packages and rewards, and they could use it to subscribe to whatever services they wished.
Technically, no reason why there couldn't be. You could even have ad bots follow you to send you targeted ads.
On Meta, you pay so they don't use some of your data for showing you ads, while they collect tons more of data on you and sell it to the highest bidder.
On the Fediverse, you only give everyone access to all your published data for free to run whatever analysis they want on it... but at least you can choose from 1000+ different instances to pick the one that will be able to track your behavioral data.
You deleted your real Facebook account... but did you delete the anonymous shadow account...?
It's not that Facebook hasn't deleted the data from your real account, it's that they keep tons of "anonymous" shadow accounts, each one of us probably has a dozen of them from different interactions with Facebook, and your new account most likely got suggestions from getting paired with those.
You can believe whatever you want. Google Music sent me a free Nest Mini back in the day, and paying for YouTube Pro is right now the cheapest way of having voice activated ad-free playlists on it.
But feel free to give me an alternative "script" that gets similar functionality for cheaper.
It's a -$10/month type of service, they'd have to pay me in order to use it... and they'd still be making money on the data and ads.
@jarfil
@lemmy.world