Like it or not, the free information about your beloved puppy or kitten that you provide to your Facebook friends is turned into potential for profit from the social media giant.

When Facebook fans “like” those puppies and children dressed up in costumes, it draws more engagement and advertisers can target you.

You give the social media superpower the potential for revenue when they take that kind of personal information — that you love cats, say — and help other companies deliver targeted advertising to you, a cat lover, to your computer.

Facebook is gifted with the ability to build revenue and engagement out of its site because subscribers provide valuable content to Facebook, for free.

Are you OK with them making money off of something you posted with the sole intent of informing your friends, and not for the social media goliath to use for its own money-making purposes?

Social media is probably the only business that exists that does that. Every other industry has to pay for its raw materials, and its input, to create a product and generate revenue.

Why not Facebook?

All those photos of cute kitten, sunsets, favorite meals and dinner shots are priceless to the person who took the photo and shared it.

But the cost to users is our identity and basic right to privacy.

Facebook gleans as much information as possible from user accounts and neatly packages it into digestible data points. The access to this “datafied” version of you is then sold to advertisers, the true community Facebook serves.

Facebook should pay all of us to post a status update or description of our life, no matter if it’s a family get-together, birthday or photos we want to share about a trip.

How about if Facebook pays us each $1 per post? A birthday get-together could demand a tidy $2 a post. It’s a start.

If Facebook makes a commitment to pay for content, perhaps they can give you a big bonus for that really cute kitten photo that’s going to have 50,000 shares.

— AA