First, Facebook wanted you to "like" things. Then, Facebook gave you an array of emotions: wow, haha, love, sad and angry.
Choose an emotion instead of just a like, and your friends get a better sense of how you feel about their posts. But doing so also tells Facebook something about you.
And that is one big reason Ben Grosser, an artist and a professor at the University of Illinois, who describes his work as "writing software in order to investigate the social effects of software", made an extension that randomises what you tell Facebook about how you're feeling.
It's called Go Rando, and - I'll be honest - it made Facebook likes a little terrifying for me when I first installed it.
Here's how it works: With Go Rando running, each time you click like on a post from your news feed, the extension intercepts that like and randomly selects one of Facebook's six reactions.
That reaction is what shows up on the post. Click like, and you might end up loving the post. Click like on another post, and it might show up as sad.
The idea is, essentially, that all those random emotions confuse the data you give Facebook.
By creating random reactions to the posts you like, you stop telling Facebook how you genuinely feel. With enough use, you'll appear more or less "balanced" to the site, Grosser said in an interview.
"It disrupts the usefulness of this emotional reaction data that Facebook is collecting," he said.
"It disconnects how we feel from the data that's getting recorded. No longer will my emotions line up neatly with easy analytic pictures of my personality. Over time, as you use Go Rando, instead of creating a picture of 'Oh, he likes those things. Oh, he hates those things,' instead it's going to look like I'm neutral."
Grosser uses the term "emotional surveillance" to talk about what Go Rando is supposed to confound.
"Emotional surveillance means using our activity online to ascertain how we feel and to connect how we feel with our interests, our hopes, our fears, in order to more effectively analyse our personalities," he said.
And that sort of personality analysis is useful "for the purposes of message targeting, predictive analytics" and a bunch of other things.
As of last year, Facebook said it did not use reactions data in its news feed, but it has also made it clear in the past that it intends to use it for this purpose sometime in the future.
Facebook said it had no updates on its use of reactions data in the News Feed when we reached out this week.
If you want to try it out, Grosser's site for the extension is here: http://bengrosser.com/projects/go-rando/
Photo: Getty Images (With Go Rando running, each time you click like on a post from your news feed, the extension intercepts that like and randomly selects one of Facebook's six reactions).