Internet Evil Empire Games – The Facebook Fourth Reich

People who follow Boggart Blog, Little Nicky Machiavelli or The Daily Stirrer will know I am no fan of the companies that are vying to control the internet. Microsoft might be “the sick man of technology” a spent power desperately trying to cling to its former glories as The Ottoman Empire was in 1914, Google are The Evil Empire, consistently evading regulators attempts to curb their ambition to control all the information in the world and quite prepared to trample on our individualism, privacy and civil rights in order to do so. Where does that put Facebook then?

After what we have learned this week of Facebook’s latest wild adventuresin alienating their userbase by announcing plans to track everything we do online and make sure the world can see it, we must consider Facebook has gone beyond evil and into the area previously occupied only by the totally amoral demons of Enochian scripture and the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft. As usual, Facebook’s disregard for people’s privacy or feelings has provoked a backlash from users and regulators. As usual Facebook has been quick to announce a climbdown.

Do not be deceived, Facebook is adept at appeasement but what their “mea culpa” will really mean is that they will not display users movements. There has been no undertaking given not to collect this data for use in building a picture of users browsing habits to assist with serving targeted adverts.

Once this is understood, coming on the heels of a major increase in the amount it aims to learn about its users lives, it could be a sign of bigger battles ahead. What is really gobsmackingly stupid of Facebook is that the corporate management do not seem to understand how their ideas will piss people off. All heads of technology corporations tend to be a bit autistic but Facebook go beyond nerdy and into the frequency range on the control freak spectrum that should only be visited by Dalek overlords, Intergalactic Emperors and their bronchitic sidekicks and leading politicians.

We owe our deliverance in this latest skirmish with privacy pirates to Nik Cubrilovic an Australian technology entrepreneur and self-described “hacker” (in his case meaning he enjoys innocently tinkering with computer software) named Nik Cubrilovic.

Mr Cubrilovic discovered that Facebook had redefined what “log out” means when people leave its pages. By monitoring the behaviour of Facebook “cookies”, small files delivered by virtually all websites to web browsers to store log in details, the contents of shopping carts and more – he found that after logging out from Facebook users are allocated another cookie which enables the website to track their browsing on other websites.

Being a former IT professional I have been aware for a long time of what cookies do and have advised people to clear their cookies at the end of as browsing session. It always amuses me when comments come in from mini nerds patronizingly explaining that cookies are not viruses and cannot do any harm. They either have not understood my point or cannot understand why, though I have no objection to cookies tracking me around a website I believe it is none of a sites business what I do after leaving  its pages.

For Facebook’s unusual cookies to work, a user must visit a website that displays one of its “Like” buttons, which are overtly designed to allow logged-in users to share a link with their friends. The “Like” button is increasingly common across the web, with webmasters keen to attract traffic from Facebook’s massive user base.

What Mr Cubrilovic showed was that by delivering cookies to users when they log out, Facebook could also use its “Like” buttons to track people’s activities across the web. Think of the implications; your boss can see what you are commenting on political sites; your partner can see if you are visiting sex oriented chat rooms; a man’s macho mates can see his guilty pleasure is romantic poetry, a woman’s stridently feminist chums can eavesdrop as she indulges her passion for bodice – ripper fiction.

“With my browser logged out of Facebook, whenever I visit any page with a Facebook like button, or share button, or any other widget, the information, including my account ID, is still being sent to Facebook,” Cubrilovic revealed on his blog.

Facebook responded in the comments section, categorically denying it was tracking logged out users, and that the cookies it delivered when a user logs out could be used to identify them later. Journalists who asked the firm about the controversy were directed to the denial, which told Mr Cubrilovic that “contrary to your article, we do delete account-specific cookies when a user logs out of Facebook”.

But 48 hours later, the firm was forced to admit it had “inadvertently included unique identifiers when the user had logged out of Facebook”, and would fix the problem as soon as possible. It said it did not store these details, so “there was no security or privacy breach”. Don’t you love the “inadvertently” as if anyone could programme such a software feature without understanding what it was going to do.

The admission attracted derision  from privacy campaigners who have long been critical of the firm’s aggressive  and dishonest responses when challenged. It has repeatedly had to be forced to climb down after first denying the charges.

In the days after the Mark Zuckerberg’s big announcement at the firm’s f8 conference, it became clear the most important of these is what Facebook calls “frictionless sharing”. When a user read an article on a third party page that displays a Facebook “Like” button, it may be reported to their Facebook friends without the user taking any action. While most of us understand that clicking a like button would result in an item noting the action being displayed on Facebook, if we opt out  by not clicking we have a right to expect our visit will remain private. It is not just for the sake of saving embarrassment that we have that right to privacy, there are business implications too.

Facebook considers the choice that its users previously made to tell their friends what they were doing was “friction”. Critics have meanwhile referred to “frictionless sharing” announced by Zuckerfucker at the f8 conference (worship session) as being more like a total surveillance system. It will certainly see Facebook’s vast data centres learn much more about their 750 million-plus patrons’ interests. Maybe they will even learn they don’t have anywhere near as many users as they thought once all the multiple id accounts are identified.

The lesson from these events is simply that Facebook’s power over the web is growing through the amount of private data it holds. It is increasingly able to bully partners and rivals and prone to ignoring privacy concerns and regulatory decisions.

With the wheels of regulation typically too slow to keep up with fleet-footed technology giants, the concerned consumer’s best ally may be competition.

Google emphasised the privacy-friendly features of its social network, Google+, when it launched this summer. A Facebook alliance with Apple collapsed last year after the iPhone maker found the terms too “onerous”. It is now preparing a new version of iOS with closer ties to Twitter.

But the kind of power Facebook seeks to exercise over the web comes from the scale of it’s the data it holds on users. To compete, the other giants of technology will surely strive to replicate that. We of course can castrate them by turning our backs social networking and withholding data. Come over to the real world.

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