Q&A: The scary details of what Facebook knows about you

Despite the apparent failure of the Initial Public Offering, Facebook is still the 1,600 lb gorilla on the Internet. It doesn’t matter that people didn’t make the money they expected. It doesn’t matter that Facebook really hasn’t figured out how to make oodles of money. It doesn’t even matter that they are becoming the place where grown-ups rather than teens are going.

None of that really matters.

What really matters is the thing I have said many times before: the Internet never forgets. All that information people have put and are still putting into the memory banks of Facebook is being collated, combed-through, referenced, linked, matched, opposed, etc. Databases are being linked into super databases with the express intent of knowing who you are down to your genetic level. (Don’t laugh. At the rate we’re going it won’t be long before we do have scanners that can read our DNA instead of a password. Since that information will be stored online, guess where at least one copy will end up?)

SmartPlanet: You’ve mentioned that the magnitude of online information Facebook has about us is stunning. Do we know exactly how much Facebook knows?

Lori Andrews: In Europe people have the right to find out what companies know about them. When an Austrian law student asked Facebook what information they had about him Facebook sent him a CD ROM with over sixteen hundred PDFs on it. So that gives an idea. Read more…

Chances are, there is more information on the individual American available to Facebook than that of a less gregarious Austrian. IMHO a large number of Americans believe the Internet to be much like the way the phone system used to be: you connect to a specific person or you allow a select few people to listen in on your line. In other words, there is a physical connection between participants and/or viewers. I suspect that it is not truly understood that the only physical things are the computers used to input and get output, the lines connecting the computers to the Internet, and the hard drives (or SSDs) hoovering all the information we give to them. Other than those, everything else is pretty much virtual. In a nutshell that means that our permissions, our locks, our gates, our vault doors, even our information bytes are just voltages that equate to a sequence of ones and zeros. The only thing that separates our ones and zeros from someone else’s are even more ones and zeros tacked on. To Facebook, all of us are ones and zeros…and dollars.

It seems that many people feel that Facebook et al. are like private dining rooms in a fancy restaurant. Etiquette and decorum decree that you don’t enter an occupied private dining room unless invited, and you don’t eavesdrop on anything being said in a private dining room to which you haven’t been invited. Therefore, unless you happen to be the loud-mouthed type, what you say or do within your private dining room stays within your private dining room. People are much more relaxed in that kind of setting and will say and show things they might not ordinarily share because of the perceived security of the space. So, they document far more of their lives into the supposed security of that Facebook “private dining room” than they would shout through a megaphone on the Washington National Mall. And while they feel secure in their digital room, they are forgetting two things: first, the Internet, unlike real life, never forgets and second, their permissions are always “plus one.” Even something marked as private and not to be shared with friends is still viewable by an entity other than the original user…and that other is Facebook itself.

Anything we put on Facebook, it remembers. Anything we “like,” it remembers. Anything our friends put on Facebook about us, it remembers. Anything people who even think they know us put on Facebook, it remembers. IMHO, the Internet is more similar to the layout of a mammalian brain than anything else. All of the individual websites are like brain cells and are pretty much static until they die. The connections between them though are constantly changing and exchanging information. Our digital selves are a collection of voltage spikes, frozen within a medium…but there is always more medium that can be added to increase our particular collection of those voltage spikes.