Opinion: Facebook's Thirst For Data Is Out Of Control

Facebook users now have to give away even more personal data than before. You can either accept it or get out. This Faustian pact between Internet giants and their users is becoming ever clearer, says Mathias von Hein.

"You are the product, not the customer," as Internet pioneer Jaron Lanier put it. This central message adorned the cover the German translation of his book "Who Owns The Future?" in which Lanier, who won last year's Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, analyzed the economy of the Internet. The result: the trend is from "big data" to total surveillance and even more commercial exploitation. Facebook is now driving that tendency forward with its new terms and conditions.



"Future" is the operative word here: financial markets operate by trading in expectations of the future, and they currently value Facebook at around $200 billion (176 billion euros), 65 percent more than last year. The stockbrokers seem convinced: Facebook will own a fat slice of the future. You can see why: in the past year, the world's biggest social network has generated around $3 billion in profits, mainly from advertising. Personalized advertising, tailored to the characteristics of its users as Facebook's algorithms dictate. They are secret, but in mid-January academics at the Universities of Stanford and Cambridge published a study on how much data can be gleaned simply from where a user clicks "Like."



'Likes' reveal your personality



The US-British team developed an algorithm that can learn about the character of a person by analyzing between 100 to 150 of their Facebook "likes" - more accurately, so they claimed, than that person's spouse. But Facebook knows more about us than it gleans from our "Likes." We post news, pictures, share messages, passions, and interests. By using it daily, almost 900 million users make sure that the profiles are constantly up to date - around 1.4 billion people are thought to be active on Facebook at least once a month.



But Facebook's thirst for data isn't slaked by this stream of personal information. Now the social network has brought new terms and conditions into force. The central innovation is that from now on, Facebook wants to know what its users do on websites outside Facebook. And Facebook wants to know where we currently are physically too - after all, a quarter of Facebook users use the service on their smartphones. And what could promise more success than the chance to feed us with commercials from firms in our immediate vicinity?



'Eat it or die'



Even the German parliament, the Bundestag, has seen fit to examine the new rules. A parliamentary committee on legal affairs criticized Facebook for its handling of users' data. But the company has shown itself to be thick-skinned about such criticism before - just as Google and others have been. The Internet giants are used to deciding the rules of the digital world themselves. National laws don't mean very much to them. Users are constantly addressed with friendly familiarity, but are never asked for permission to change such rules. Either accept the new rules or leave.



But very few will. The longer one has been on the network, the more pictures one has uploaded to it, the more contacts you have there, the less you'll want to delete your profile, or even be able to. Like a junkie with the dealer who has made him an addict. But what might be a better image for a friendly authority figure offering you the choice of "eat it or die" - what about a big brother?