Facebook says, 'Privacy is theft,' because they're selling your lack of privacy to the advertisers who might show up one day.
Interpretation
The quote highlights how companies profit from user data by compromising privacy.
Jaron Lanier is emphasizing the paradox of social media platforms like Facebook, which assert that privacy is a form of theft. This statement suggests that the commodification of personal data is intrinsic to their business model; by exploiting the lack of user privacy, these companies are essentially 'selling' individuals to advertisers, turning private information into profit at the cost of personal autonomy.
In practice
In a discussion about digital privacy during a technology conference.
Pop culture has entered into a nostalgic malaise. Online culture is dominated by trivial mashups of the culture that existed before the onset of mashups, and by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media. It is a culture of reaction without action.
We're losing track of the vastness of the potential for computer science. We really have to revive the beautiful intellectual joy of it, as opposed to the business potential.
Separation anxiety is assuaged by constant connection. Young people announce every detail of their lives on services like Twitter not to show off, but to avoid the closed door at bedtime, the empty room, the screaming vacuum of an isolated mind.
Web 2.0 ideas have a chirpy, cheerful rhetoric to them, but I think they consistently express a profound pessimism about humans, human nature and the human future.
I mean, you can't have advertising be the only official business of the information economy if the information economy is going to take over.
When you have a global mush, people lose their identity, they become pseudonyms, they have no investment and no consequence in what they do.
Technology will save us if it doesn't wipe us out first.
What we are finding out now is that there are not only limits to growth but also to technology and that we cannot allow technology to go on without public consent.
Every tech story is different. Every moment in history happens only once. All successful companies are successful in their own unique way. It's your task to figure out what that future history will be.
Most of the time spent wrestling with technologies that don't quite work yet is just not worth the effort for end users, however much fun it is for nerds like us.
Technology has moved away from sharing and toward ownership. This suits software and hardware companies just fine: They create new, bloated programs that require more disk space and processing power. We buy bigger, faster computers, which then require more complex operating systems, and so on.
Helping a billion people connect is amazing, humbling and by far the thing I am most proud of in my life.
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