 The social value of perusing this is debatable, but the economic value has been undeniable. At the time this was written, Mark Zuckerberg has been constantly listed in the top ten richest billionaires by Forbes Magazine where he is typically in the top five of that rarefied group. An achievement built on providing a free service to the world. What companies like Facebook do charge for are services, such as directed advertising, which allow third party companies to access information that users have provided to the social media applications. The result is that ads bought on an application such as Facebook are more likely to be seen as useful to viewers who are much more likely to click on these ads and buy the advertised products. The more detailed and personal the information shared, the more valuable it will be to the companies that it is shared with. This radical transparency of sharing deeply personal information with companies like Facebook is encouraged. Those who do use social networking technologies do receive value as evidenced by the rapid growth of this technology. Statista reports that in 2019 there will be 2.77 billion users of social media worldwide and it will grow to 3.02 by 2021 (Statista, 2018). The question here is, what do we give up in order to receive this “free” service? In 2011, back when there were less than a billion social media users the technology critic Andrew Keen warned that, “sharing is a trap,” and that there was a kind of cult of radical transparency developing that clouded our ability to think critically about the kind of power we were giving these companies (Keen, 2011). Even before companies like Facebook were making huge profits, there were those warning of the dangers of the cult of transparency with warning such as: 