Facebook’s Dr Evil wants to be your closest friend

Facebook’s Dr Evil wants to be your closest friend. Opposition to the social networking site is growing as it seeks to milk users for ever more personal information.

Mark Zuckerberg will be 26 on May 14 but he looks younger. He is worth $4 billion and he runs a website with 400m users and rising. This website could be worth £15 billion. Or next to nothing. Everybody used to love this website. Not any more.

Zuckerberg’s Facebook — dreamt up in his Harvard dorm room in 2004 — is to social networking what the iPod is to MP3 players. It is the industry standard.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Teenage girl using laptop

Once used overwhelmingly by teens and students, it now crosses all demographic groups. All it does is connect people. Joining, you rapidly acquire lists of friends, learn what they are up to, see their photographs and so on. Increasingly, however, it is used by companies to generate a buzz about their products or to trawl for information. And this is where things get tricky.

You see, Zuckerberg has a problem. He doesn’t make much money. In fact, since almost everything about Facebook is free, it is hard to see how he makes any. Yet in 2007 Microsoft paid $240m for a 1.6% share in the company. It did not do this to make people happy. It did it to make money. But how?

The answer is, or should be, obvious. Facebook’s database appears to be pure marketing gold. It will soon embrace every detail of the likes, dislikes, habits, obsessions, love lives and shopping of half a billion people. These are people who can be targeted by advertising and marketing.

That means selling their details, and at that point the Facebook friendly mask drops to be replaced by something far harsher.

Down the phone line from Berkeley, California, Jaron Lanier chuckles. “It’s a bizarre dotcomedy to me. Facebook keeps trying to become more sinister, keeps trying to be Dr Evil, and keeps fumbling it,” he says. Lanier is a Silicon Valley aristo who is credited with inventing virtual reality and has now turned against the culture of the place. His latest book, You Are Not a Gadget, is a scathing attack on the Valley’s betrayal of its early ideals.

Facebook has made three attempts to “monetise” its database. The first, in 2007, was Beacon. This linked commercial sites to Facebook and was presented as a new sharing tool: in fact, it allowed companies into the users’ personal details. There was a class-action lawsuit and it was shut down last September.

Then, in December, Facebook changed its privacy settings — the ways users can determine what information is made public. This became known as Facebook’s Greatest Betrayal because it forced previously private information out into the open. Worse, the new settings were almost impossible for a casual user to keep track of.

“If you’re a skilled computer programmer,” says Lanier, “you could probably understand the privacy settings, and if you aren’t, then you don’t have the skill to use Facebook in a knowing way.”

Now — Dr Evil attempt No3 — Facebook has announced a series of radical changes called “social plug-ins”. We can instantly tell our friends what we like by pressing a “Like” button on whatever website we happen to enjoy. Superficially, this gimmick sounds innocent. But it reveals your details to companies that can then target you. It personalises your web browsing, but at the expense of exposing you to commercial pressure. All of which has turned out to be slightly less popular than toothache.

“So now you’ll have the most comprehensive database concerning people and their interests,” snarls SJ Buckner on her Anti-Facebook League of Intelligentsia blog. “You’ve made an information-sharing deal to help companies target consumers. Good. Because that’s what we all desire deep down inside. To be targeted. We all want to be the deer behind the hunter’s gun.”

The big geek blog TechCrunch reported that, after the Facebook announcement, “a lot of geeks are considering leaving Facebook” and “veritable droves of Google software engineers are among them”.

Anti-Facebook feeling is not new. As long ago as 2008 students were setting up “Facebook refusenik” groups. But that was a generic protest about people spending too much time on their computers. This is different; this is the anger of net idealists who feel they have been sold to The Man, the faceless embodiment of corporate power.

Most worrying of all for Facebook, four US senators wrote to Zuckerberg after the social plug-in announcement, raising concerns about publicly available data, third- party storage of data and instant personalisation, which threatens to hand out friend lists and personal data to “third-party partners”.

Should you worry about this? Well, yes. Your sex, postcode and date of birth are all that is needed to steal your identity. For millions, those details and, thanks to Facebook, many others are out there. We can be sloppy about this.

Mary Madden, of the Internet & American Life Project, run by the Pew Research Center think tank in Washington, points out an alarming disconnect between what people say about preserving their privacy and what they do on the internet. “The young say they do care about their privacy and control over their information but we don’t see a great level of vigilance. There are contradictions. The important point is that privacy is often discussed in binary terms — either they do care or they don’t. But in reality there are many shades of grey,” she says.

So maybe we should think of “privacy” slightly differently when considering Facebook’s relentless attempt to make money by getting inside our heads and sifting through our tastes, habits and compulsions.

Certainly, Lanier is pretty relaxed about the threats of privacy invasions and identity thefts, but about the Facebook land grab on the space in our heads, he is not so laid-back. The way the internet has developed, he believes, is hollowing out our humanity. “We are gradually installing a social contract in which what we do with our brains isn’t worth anything so we’re gradually reducing all of our prospects. We do pay for it but in a sort of slow, gradual way,” he says.

If you really must be hollowed out but want to avoid the attentions of The Man and his data miners, here is my advice. Mislead. Misdirect. Where possible, put in false birth dates, wrong postcodes; invent weird interests. Remember, out there on the internet, lying is the new truth. ( timesonline.co.uk )

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