Facebook's ideological shell game

Just because a product is free doesn't make it virtuous

Mark Zuckerberg.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will testify before Congress tomorrow. It turns out Cambridge Analytica scraped way more user data than everyone initially realized, and other third parties have probably purloined data on most of the platform's two billion users. Congress, like most everyone else, wants answers.

But Zuckerberg also has a big problem: Selling user data is its business model. It provides its platform to users for free so it has to make money somehow.

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Jeff Spross

Jeff Spross was the economics and business correspondent at TheWeek.com. He was previously a reporter at ThinkProgress.