Selling our souls to Mark Zuckerberg

September 28, 2011

When Mark Zuckerberg stood on stage last week to introduce Facebook's latest upgrades, the social media mogul essentially offered this deal to his 750 million (and growing) users:

Hand over your data, your life, your … soul. And enjoy eternal like in the social media universe.

This has been the deal proffered by Facebook from the beginning. Since 2004, many of us have been happily paying for this free network with the bits and bytes of our lives. Our reward: An instant source of birthday greetings and thumbs-up affirmation of every status update we post. It's been an intoxicating wave of friending, fans, likes and tags.

Rolling out now, a new "Timeline" format promises to document the entire history of our lives, or as much of it as we're willing to share — and we generally share too much. The look of Facebook is about to change, and our profiles will turn into slick digital scrapbooks. "It's your life," proclaimed Zuckerberg from the stage of Facebook's annual f8 developers conference, where he flashed tantalizing details of his own life ("first road trip with my girlfriend!") to wow the crowd — and some 80,000 people watching on a live stream.

The Timeline will likely appeal to the narcissist in most of us, but it's another new feature that marks the real sobering crossroads. As you provide all of your Timeline life data, new "Open Graph" apps, Zuckerberg said, will expand the notion of sharing for a "frictionless user experience."

A frictionless wha?

It means that in the very near Facebook future, much of what you do online — listen to music, watch videos, read news stories — will be available directly through Facebook. One-stop shopping, or listening or viewing. That's convenient. But Facebook, mostly through your "likes" — and with its growing list of partners, including Netflix, Spotify and The Washington Post — will track all of your shopping, listening and viewing and identify patterns so that it can suggest more things to buy, listen to or view.

Then, because this is a social network, all of your shopping, listening and viewing will be announced immediately to your friends. (Yes, even that Neil Diamond playlist you just tried to hide.) The "frictionless" part means that you'll contribute to those valuable market-research patterns without even noticing. Hit a "like" button on your friend's guilty pleasure song choice and, wham. It's word-of-mouth marketing on steroids.

And so "it's your life" more blatantly than ever becomes "it's your life for Facebook to exploit."

Which brings us back to the crossroads.

Market research is nothing new. The concentration of data in the hands of one company is, though, and it should raise concern. The data (and those patterns) provided by his 750 million users — us — is marketing gold that will be parlayed into enormous financial gain for Facebook and its partners (there's a Facebook IPO just around the corner).

Swept up by the feel-good effects of "friends" and "like" buttons, 750 million of us have unwittingly allowed a business model that relies on our giving away information and then celebrating the "free" access we have to it. SOURCE:

Shouldn't Mark Zuckerberg be paying us?