"Facebook says, 'Privacy is theft,' because they're selling your lack of privacy to the advertisers who might show up one day"

The line lampoons a business model that treats personal disclosure as the raw material of commerce. By flipping morality, “privacy is theft”, the platform implies that withholding data deprives the system of value, as if you were stealing from the community by not sharing. It reframes discretion as antisocial while presenting exposure as participation, belonging, and even virtue.

That reversal keeps an ad-based economy running. Behavioral data fuels targeting, prediction, and subtle influence; more traces mean more precise segmentation and higher ad prices. Defaults are tuned to minimize friction for disclosure, settings are labyrinthine, and social rewards, likes, tags, memories, nudge people toward constant revelation. The company sells not just ads but an ever-improving map of human attention, desire, and vulnerability.

“Selling your lack of privacy” captures the product on offer: access to you, modeled and forecastable. The phrase “to the advertisers who might show up one day” highlights the speculative hoarding at the core of surveillance business. Data is stockpiled now for uncertain future uses, new markets, new partners, new algorithms, because its option value grows with scale and time. Today’s innocuous click becomes tomorrow’s predictive signal.

There is also a sharp asymmetry. Individuals are urged to be transparent while the platform remains opaque, proprietary algorithms, secret partner deals, hidden inferences, shadow profiles. Privacy becomes a liability only for the user; secrecy remains an asset for the firm. That linguistic trick helps normalize extraction and shifts responsibility from the system’s design to the user’s choices.

The costs are social as well as personal: manipulation, discrimination, chilling effects on speech, and ever-finer behavioral steering. The critique pushes toward different incentives, services that do not depend on harvesting, true data minimization, enforceable transparency, and the possibility of paying with money rather than with one’s life in data. It insists that privacy is not theft but a condition for dignity, autonomy, and trust.