The new logic of accumulation spread first to Facebook, which launched the same year that Google went public. CEO Mark Zuckerberg had rejected the strategy of charging users a fee for service as the telephone companies had done in an earlier century. “Our mission is to connect every person in the world. You don’t do that by having a service people pay for,” he insisted. In May 2007 he introduced the Facebook platform, opening up the social network to everyone, not just people with a college e-mail address. Six months later, in November, he launched his big advertising product, Beacon, which would automatically share transactions from partner websites with all of a user’s “friends.” These posts would appear even if the user was not currently logged into Facebook, without the user’s knowledge or an opt-in function. The howls of protest—from users but also from some of Facebook’s partners such as Coca-Cola—forced Zuckerberg to back down swiftly. By December, Beacon became an opt-in program. The twenty-three-year-old CEO understood the potential of surveillance capitalism, but he had not yet mastered Google’s facility in obscuring its operations and intent.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 290