Re: Bias Much?
"In general, Facebook and Google don't sell an individual users details because no one wants to pay for that."
Facebook and Twitter's first generation data services were exactly this. Fine grained, cleansed, matched content at the individual user/post level fed right into your servers. Plenty of people paid for it. The problem is it costs a fortune to scale and turns your (data) customers into your competitors, because the data are only valuable in an advertising context (or, you know, fraud).
It is much more cost-effective to sell aggregated datasets and advertising services rather than the raw data, which has the happy coincidence of ensuring you're the only one making money from the data itself.
Google never made this mistake.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
