I bought my first
record in the summer of 1964. It was a Beach Boys single, "I Get
Around." It was not a stunning
example of sophisticated literary poetics:
I'm
gettin' bugged driving up and down the same old strip
I
gotta find a new place where the kids are hip
Yeah, well. It's not
Leonard Cohen, Kris Kristofferson, or Bob Dylan, but I loved it. I was crazy about the Beach Boys. I eventually
succumbed to Beatlemania, but for a few years I was a confirmed Beach Boys fanatic.
We all were fanatics about one thing or another. And, somehow, we had money
to spend on the fads of the day: In the
50s it was Hula-Hoops; Davey Crockett-style coonskin
caps; Slinky; and of course, music by Elvis (never really "the king"
for me), The Big Bopper, and Fats Domino. In the 60s, we went for
bell-bottoms; Beatle boots; balsa-wood airplanes; lava lamps; banana seats on
bicycles; granny glasses, slot cars, and of course, music by Paul Anka (I feel really bad about that one), Frankie Avalon (OK, that one, too), the Beach Boys,
the Beatles, The Doors, The Jefferson Airplane, and dozens more. (There are
probably photos of me wearing bell-bottoms and granny glasses, but these photos
will never see the light of day. Why? Because I did all of my stupid sh*t before there was an Internet.)
Not only did we have
the money to purchase such items, but advertisers, beginning in the 1950s, knew we had money -- or, through our parents, access to money. Suddenly, teenagers were a
potential revenue stream, a big one. Not only that, they became, to a much
greater extent than in previous years, what the Saturday
Evening Post (yes, it still exists -- online, at any rate) calls the
"chief financial officers of family spending." They were -- and
remain -- what today we would call important influencers.
The bottom line (so
to speak) is that teens are worth a lot of
money. And if you think that advertisers are going to ignore that influence,
well . . . ha, ha, ha, boy, are you dumb.
In the last edition
of The Geekly Weekly I took Google to task over its blatant attempt to bribe users by paying them to
enter personal info via its "Google Survey" app, but Facebook has
gone them one better: Zuckerberg and his associates have now released
"Facebook Research," an application that, upon installation, requests high
levels of access to users' devices, thus enabling The Zuck to collect vast
amounts of information about the user. Even the very young user. (The program is really just a rebranded version of an application called Onavo, created earlier by an Israeli company owned by -- you guessed it -- Facebook.) While the app
requires "parental consent" before use, really that's just a simple
tick-box that anyone -- including your 11-year-old -- could click. This
probably satisfies the COPPA
legal requirements, but let's face it: young users may not even understand what
it is that they're agreeing to.
![]() |
Mark Zuckerberg in 2018. Photo by Anthony Quintano and used under the Creative Commons 2.0 license. |
And what they're
agreeing to is this: Facebook will pay you $20 per month if you let them
collect scads of info about you and your habits, including your phone and Web
use. That's what your privacy is worth. $20. (Apple has already jumped on this,
telling Facebook that it can no longer distribute the app. You never could
download it from Apple, but Facebook had been distributing the iPhone version of the app from its own site, a practice which Apple has now disallowed. So far, Google has not followed Apple's lead.)
Now, if you're
willing to give up your privacy for $20 a month, then I suppose that's your
business: you are, I assume, a functioning adult, able to make such decisions
on your own behalf. But what about your son or daughter? Or your niece or
nephew? Does your 14-year-old possess the intellectual wherewithal, the
demonstrated maturity required to make such a decision? As I think back to my
teenage years, I'm pretty sure that I was not equipped to make smart decisions
about such things. Or, come to think of it, about most things.