WHY SHOULD YOU BE WORRIED ABOUT IT?
Facebook boasts revenue of only about $800 million a year, but could be worth as much as $15 billion. Though the company only turned cash-flow positive in 2009, its vast net worth and host of big-money investors make it extremely unlikely that anything short of the sudden death of a hundred million users could threaten its survival. Still, Facebook is going to do everything it can to avoid damage to its bottom line.
Facebook’s bread is buttered with your tasty personal details. For all intents and purposes, any content you add to Facebook is owned by Facebook, and therefore becomes a commodity in its extraordinarily deep portfolio of psychographic data. Facebook will use that information any way it can to make money. It’s a corporation, and its purpose is to make money.
Any paranoiac worth his tinfoil hat worries first and foremost about the government: What they know; what they think they know; what they do with all those black helicopters. Facebook, as a young company with ambitions of world conquest, wants very badly not to annoy the government, so it goes out of its way to be accommodating.
With the aid of Facebook, the government could know quite a lot about you. Government spooks might be friending you under false names, trolling your pictures and status updates for any hint of illegal activity. Even more alarming, however, is a Justice Department document that mentions Facebook is “often cooperative with emergency requests.”
That means that when the feds approach Facebook asking for information, the company is likely to surrender it—with or without a warrant—as long as the government promises it’s really, really important. But then, why worry? If you can’t trust the government with private information obtained secretly, who can you trust?
Also—and here’s a fun thought—Facebook is an American company, but it operates globally. If it’s willing to surrender information about users to the U.S. Justice Department, why would it be unwilling to surrender similar information to other governments?
Interestingly, Facebook has become a critical resource for human rights activists around the globe. Facebook (and Twitter, YouTube, and other similar sites) was critical in organizing and raising the profile of the Green Revolution in Iran. It was a two-way street: The open nature of the site made identifying protesters relatively simple for the government; however, thanks to the speed of the social network, the government couldn’t stop the video of the brutal killing of Neda Agha-Soltan from being posted and propagated. The Iranian government was reduced to complaining (and then following up with mass arrests and torture).
It’s important to note that Facebook didn’t take much of an active role in this drama. The network was a tool of both empowerment and repression. The Iranian secret police clearly fear the power of social networking sites, going so far as to question foreign visitors about their accounts.