Facebook Readies IPO Filing - SHAYNDI RAICE and RANDALL SMITH

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204573704577187062821038498.html

If you're not paying for a product or service, guess what? You are the product.

Facebook has the means to offer marketers the data on hundreds of millions of consumers, consumers who have already gone through the trouble of letting them know what they like and don't like, and who their friends are. Thinking of Facebook as a provider of a platform for social interaction is a small part of the story. Their real model is that they are producer of consumer data, something like Nielsen but 100x more powerful, offering the purest consumer insight available. That is how they are going to make their billions, and why privacy is such an issue for them.