Originally Posted by
Walter S
Because your paranoia and self importance is over the top.
Nothing to do with self-importance. Collecting information about people to sell as marketing data would not say anything about my importance relative to anyone else.
You think Machka works for a company that cares whether you personally live close to trees? That must be the reason for her other questions about you huh? She's an information sponge gathering these important facts like "there's this dude on BF called tandempower that says he lives near trees". I'm sure you can illuminate the economic riches that knowledge like that generates and how it dwarfs the cost of employing people like Machka to gather such nuggets as compared to simply buying statistics compiled from satellite imagery.
I really don't know all the reasons people gather information, but I can imagine lots. E.g. someone could be testing software that predicts information based on existing information, so if Machka was using BF to test such software, she might ask such questions as part of her software-testing protocols. I'm not contending that she is doing that, but it's not unreasonable to consider that it could be someone's job.