Everytime I intentionally interact with Meta's apps/data factories, I feel a bit like in the movie Matrix when Neo is disconnected from the Matrix, wakes up from his pod and sees the other pods. And have to admit I saw that movie when I was to young for it and that scene really did a number on me.
I don't mind being public but I mind if I'm in a way a slave to an entity that uses that to farm my identity and distorts my perception of reality.
If they farm your identity, they do so whether you post online or not. The only way to not contribute is to practice no identity. In that case your biomass still serves as a battery somehow (the movie fails to explain the physics here.)
As I heard it explained, the original manuscript had the humans kept alive because the Matrix was actually running on the humans' brains as the computing substrate. This both made much more sense than humans as a power source, was more horrific, and a better story.
Apparently this was deemed to hard for the unwashed masses to understand, and we were left with this battery analogy instead.
Huh interesting. It makes also much more sense then to have some humans have the ability to change things in the Matrix, considering it was basically running on their brains.
The big question in that case though is why? Why would the AIs keep a simulation of the old world?
To answer your Q tho, this was in one of the sequels I believe, basically the first iterations of the matrix were like "Eden" but humans couldn't adapt to it so they redesigned and iterated it into what you see in the movie. The idea being that if humans weren't busy they'd realize they were enslaved so they had to make a system to keep humans occupied and stimulated enough to be useful.
I don't mind being public but I mind if I'm in a way a slave to an entity that uses that to farm my identity and distorts my perception of reality.