Slate

The internet is already massively concentrated, with just a few platforms commanding the majority of people’s time online. Once those entrenched powers can start to set the price for priority service, they stand to become even more powerful. Those smaller websites that are taking longer to load may slowly start to disappear too, and the great promise of the internet—that there’s no telling what someone might create next—may become an even more distant dream. So be on the lookout over the next few weeks for notices from your internet service provider with changes to your terms of service.

Klout, the service which measured online influence and assigned people a zero-to-100 score based on their social media followings, will shut down on May 25. Everyone’s Klout scores will go away, and with them, any remaining chance that businesses will treat us better or worse based on those scores. But the data Klout gathered from people presumably lives on. Lithium Technologies, the social-media marketing company that bought Klout in 2014, implied in its announcement that it has integrated Klout’s software and data into its own products. 

he pithiness that makes “you are the product” so quotable risks obscuring the complex pact between Facebook and its users, in ways that make social media’s problems seem inevitable and insoluble. They’re not—but if we want to fix them, the first thing we need to do is redefine our relationship. To the extent that our personal data has become a product, it’s because we—and our representatives in government—have allowed it to happen. If we don’t like how Facebook is treating us, we shouldn’t throw up our hands and call ourselves the product of a system over which we have no control.