Most people associate Facebook with cute family photos and think of Google like a semi-reliable encyclopedia. But these services have only a tangential relationship to the way either company actually makes money. The twin Silicon Valley titans rely on two closely intertwined technologies, customer surveillance and advertising, to maximize shareholder profits.

Source: Facebook And Google’s Surveillance Capitalism Model Is In Trouble | HuffPost
Social media’s surveillance of end users conflicts with European laws, and may conflict with the general public’s wishes, if the general public understood what these companies are doing with their collection of personal data about all of us.