You, sir, should read the next paragraph in the Wikipedia article you linked to:

A customer may or may not also be a consumer, but the two notions are distinct, even though the terms are commonly confused. A customer purchases goods;

That would be advertisers paying money to Facebook in exchange for your data so they can target ads at you

a consumer uses them.

That would be you clicking Like on that Miley Cyrus video, generating the data (the product) that the advertisers are willing to pay Facebook for.

An ultimate customer may be a consumer as well, but just as equally may have purchased items for someone else to consume.

That would be the advertisers (the customer) providing the revenue Facebook requires to provide the service to you (the consumer).

I already covered this in my previous comment, but maybe I failed to make myself clear. Yes, Facebook users exchange their data for the use of the service, but their data in and of itself is of minimal value to Facebook. Sure, it may give them opportunities to expand their user-base, for example. Especially if you are willing to allow them to harvest the contacts in your email client.

It is the advertisers who value you data, and are willing to exchange money for it. That provides the revenue Facebook needs to keep operating.

You are providing a resource to Facebook in return for the use of their service, which they then refine and sell to their customers. It's no different than the farmer who grows the potatoes that McDonald's turns in to french fries, except the farmer is probably being paid in cash rather than cat videos.

Is the farmer the customer?

Here's a better analogy, and it even has a car in it:

I'm a high school kid and my dad runs a used car lot. I come in after school and on weekends and wash cars on the lot so they will be more appealing to my dad's customers. He doesn't pay me, because I'm his kid and he's a cheapskate, but in exchange for my efforts he occasionally lets me drive one of the cars from the lot.

So I'm giving something that is of limited value on it's own, but increases my dad's ability to generate revenue for his car lot so it can stay in business, and in return receive the use of some of the company's assets.

Now substitute washing cars with clicking Like buttons, and using cars from the lot with using the site, and you begin to get the picture. The fact that I exchanged a bit of labour for the occasional use of a car from the lot does not make me the customer. I'm more like a supplier, or a sub-trade even.

But I'm sure I'm not changing your mind about anything, if you've even bothered to read this far. If you want to think of yourself as Facebook's customer, go right ahead. But your use of their site on its own generates no revenue, and without revenue a company isn't viable. In my book the actor providing the revenue is the customer. They are the ones my business will cater to.

Having someone wash the cars on my lot is great, and might even help my business, but without cash-paying customers my business will fail.

Wow, I can understand your frustration.

Users restarting their machines to get around the virus scan is an issue for their supervisor to address. Hammering them with back-to-back scans only increases their frustration and the likelihood that they will continue to look for ways to defeat the process.

Battles between IT and users are common, and we've had to lock down some of the machines at my company to stop bad behavior, but it really sounds like things have progressed to the point where your IT department is simply being obstinate. Yes, it's important that the scans complete, but if your users can not do their jobs for six or seven hours of every week, pretty soon there will be no point in scanning the machines. You'll be out of business.

Most people in my office don't even come in on Tuesdays anymore because that's virus scan day. It starts a 1AM and nothing on your machine will work until at least 3PM

If it is actually taking 14 hours to complete a virus scan, I would be looking for other issues with the hardware. Seriously, 14 hours? We use McAfee VirusScan Enterprise where I work, and most full system scans complete within an hour or so. If you weren't exaggerating, your security group must be truly incompetent as that is beyond acceptable.

As a workaround, depending on your office hours you could begin the scans at 6:00 PM instead of 1:00 AM, so they would be finished by 8:00 the following morning. That won't solve the mystery as to why your scans are taking so long, but at least the people in your office could start coming in on Tuesdays again.

Company have multiple types of customers. Hint: Facebook's users ARE customers.

Accepting for the moment that company (sic) have multiple types of customers, the most important "type" would be the one who is paying the bills. And that certainly isn't the user.

Honestly, read a book or something. The idea that the consumers of online services are the product, not the customer, is neither new or particularly controversial. You could argue, and I suppose you are, that the user is paying for the services received by providing personal information in exchange for the service, but that would make them more like a supplier of raw material (their "likes," their social connections etc) that is then processed and re-sold to advertisers who use that information target ads at the users.

The ultimate customer is the purchaser of those ads, regardless of whether you feel you received something of value in exchange for the information you provided.

Just because they aren't buying anything doesn't mean they aren't customers. You have a lot to learn about business

My business provides services to clients on behalf of other businesses. We work hard to ensure that the consumers of those services are happy and never forget how important they are to the viability of our business, but they are not customers, they are clients. Our customers are the businesses who pay us to provide those services to their customers, our clients.

If you can provide examples of businesses that remained viable despite their customers not buying anything, then I will defer to your obviously superior business knowledge.

Not only that, Lanier seems to be confused about who Facebook's customer is. Hint: it's not the user.

That is some world-class hipsterism, right there. I tip my hat to you.

The twenty and thirty-something crowd where I work got a real kick out of your "hipster" comment. Yeah, I guess I'll have to get a fedora and some skinny jeans.

Probably. It says he hosts "On Air with Ryan Seacrest, a popular morning radio show on KIIS-FM."

who?

Apparently he's a celebrity. Wikipedia says he's a radio personality and hosts a show called American Idol.

I had to look it up too.

NSA wrote the malware and implicated China

That was my thought. The only countries who have attempted something on the scale of what the NSA is alleging are (allegedely) the United States and Isreal, who (allegedely) unleashed Stuxnet on the world.

And I agree with the poster above - why would China wish to cripple the economy of one of the largest customers of its goods.

This isn't passing the smell test.

yes, all those men having sex with boys certainly aren't gay at all!

Correct. People who are sexually attracted to children are pedos, not gay.