For context, I have a stub facebook account with practically no activity, mainly just to show people in our society i exist. I don't like social media and i think the whole phenomenon is a net negative for humanity.

Professionally, people might call me a data analyst or a data scientist, but to the layperson in terms of describing 'what I actually do for money', I think its basically 'imagine sherlock holmes grew up being able to program'.

There's an element of those 'what I think i do' memes in that statement, but I think there's an important philosophical concept I've been dealing with lurking under all that and I'm not sure how our society is going to deal with it.

Excluding those instances of 'actual spyware', people just ooze and leak information perpetually throughout the day. This information is being put out there whether they are aware of it or not, but its primarily the reciever's sensitivity, infrastructure and use of that information that determines whether its:

a) perceived as information at all

b) is captured

c) is then used for some purpose of the capturing entity

The character of sherlock holmes gets away with it because he's an anomaly, because people perceive him to be good and working against the 'bad guys', and honestly, because people just don't really think about the privacy and lifestyle implications of being in his presence.

Now however, we're at this point where corporations have an ability to collect the information that exceeds the average person's ability to comprehend/process that information. Its not as good as sherlock, buts its above that of the average person. Part of that is just because our educational systems do such a piss-poor job of getting people to interpret or analyse information, but part of it is just the natural evolution of systems and infrastructure now being able to capture, process and use the information being output into the world that's always has and always will be there.

A power company doesn't need to install any spyware: you just need to look at the patterns in your power consumption to determine what a person is doing at what times.

A phone company doesn't need to install any spyware: they need your hardware details, your physical location, metadata to serve you websites, metadata to provide you calls, your billing details and identity.

Your grocery doesn't need to install any spyware: they know the product mix in your trolley tells them everything they need to know, and if you pay with non-cash means or have a loyalty card, they also have sufficient identity and personal details as well.

Your bank doesn't need to install any spyware: they know the merchants, time, place, amount, and identity details of your transactions.

A government agency doesn't need to install spyware: you have a birth certificate, (will have) a death certificate, and you verify your identity each time you interact with them.

If you think those companies aren't doing this already, congrats, you're living in ignorance.

Facebook doesn't need to install spyware (whether they are or not is another question). People are participating in their ecosystem and on top of that, providing huge amounts of additional information out into the public stream in a systematic way that previously was not previously available and not previously being shared on such a scale.

The existence of facebook and social media (the structure of the thing itself, as an instance of a particular phenomenon on a certain kind of telecommunications and tech infrastructure, rather than the individual instances of companies) leaks and necessitates this information being put out there to be used.

Now, we can say to people 'i don't like that they're doing this with that information', but its important to separate that from the actual information being put out there, and from the fact that there are many individuals who can use and successfully interpret that information, whether they work for facebook or not.

You can try to ban facebook from using that information (god knows what that would look like, i imagine it would be a horrible set of laws), but its like trying to ban sherlock from having thoughts and piecing together the mud on your shoe from the footprint in the lobby: only there's a lot more sherlocks running around out there now and people are voluntarily putting cameras into their own home and broadcasting it.