Is Facebook Wells’ Big Brother?

Filed in Discussion on Dec.18, 2009 By Keith Lunt

When Facebook made the national news a week ago through changing its privacy policy (e.g. here), it shows that the website not only has a huge exposure to the population, but also that people are genuinely worried about the data it holds on them.

And we are right to be.

My background before websites was 10 years of databases for the largest privately owned company in the land.. And much of that was spent datawarehousing. Basically, every bit of data that passed through the organisation was passed to the team I managed. We stored it and were experts at recalling it and matching it to data from other areas of the business. Other IT teams when asked data questions about their own data would quite often through their hands in the air and pass the question to me. We were the team that could extrapolate information from data taken from anywhere.

And I know from that just how far we can take this data manipulation. We took monthly feeds of 20,000,000 addresses and matched these to our our records, identifying individuals with multilple accounts and saving the company a lot of cash along the way.

So I know the tricks that a business with a big database can apply to the data and can only start to imagine what exactly Facebook is gathering on its own members. It won’t just be gathering information that you enter to the database, but will be monitoring your activities on the site.

Don’t believe that? Then explain some of the strange, but accurate, friend predictions that it can produce. How exactly does Facebook know that you should be a friend of Joe Bloggs who lives the other side of the country?

Such information gathering is the only way to explain how Facebook predicts some of the friend suggestions that we see regularly. They are not random – they are accurate. But they are certainly not people we ourselves have searched for and the whole discussion is worthy of its own entry!

So what does Facebook do with this huge database? At the moment it just seems to gather it all together to suggest friends to increase every member’s circle of friends. Clever, but a huge and very expensive database.

What they have planned for that data down the line I don’t know. Maybe it is just to increase the social networks of all members. But maybe in the future, maybe with future owners, that same data could be put to commercial use. If your friends click on certain interest based advertising on the site then so might you. If your friend clicks on an advert for a concert then email you an advert for that same concert.

It is all certainly possible. It just needs the data to be stored and captured. And it looks to me like that is what they are doing.