Facebook, tool for gathering data by CIA

I’ve said it before, and now this article in the guardian explains what I been thinking, thanks to Laura for bringing it to my attention

With friends like these …

•                         Tom Hodgkinson
•   The Guardian,
• Monday January 14 2008

The following correction was printed in the Guardian’s Corrections and clarifications column, Wednesday January 16 2008

The US intelligence community’s enthusiasm for hi-tech innovation after
9/11 and the creation of In-Q-Tel, its venture capital fund, in 1999
were anachronistically linked in the article below. Since 9/11 happened
in 2001 it could not have led to the setting up of In-Q-Tel two years
earlier.

I despise Facebook. This enormously successful American business
describes itself as "a social utility that connects you with the people
around you". But hang on. Why on God’s earth would I need a computer to
connect with the people around me? Why should my relationships be
mediated through the imagination of a bunch of supergeeks in
California? What was wrong with the pub?

And does Facebook
really connect people? Doesn’t it rather disconnect us, since instead
of doing something enjoyable such as talking and eating and dancing and
drinking with my friends, I am merely sending them little ungrammatical
notes and amusing photos in cyberspace, while chained to my desk? A
friend of mine recently told me that he had spent a Saturday night at
home alone on Facebook, drinking at his desk. What a gloomy image. Far
from connecting us, Facebook actually isolates us at our workstations.

Facebook
appeals to a kind of vanity and self-importance in us, too. If I put up
a flattering picture of myself with a list of my favourite things, I
can construct an artificial representation of who I am in order to get
sex or approval. ("I like Facebook," said another friend. "I got a shag
out of it.") It also encourages a disturbing competitivness around
friendship: it seems that with friends today, quality counts for
nothing and quantity is king. The more friends you have, the better you
are. You are "popular", in the sense much loved in American high
schools. Witness the cover line on Dennis Publishing’s new Facebook
magazine: "How To Double Your Friends List."

It seems, though,
that I am very much alone in my hostility. At the time of writing
Facebook claims 59 million active users, including 7 million in the UK,
Facebook’s third-biggest customer after the US and Canada. That’s 59
million suckers, all of whom have volunteered their ID card information
and consumer preferences to an American business they know nothing
about. Right now, 2 million new people join each week. At the present
rate of growth, Facebook will have more than 200 million active users
by this time next year. And I would predict that, if anything, its rate
of growth will accelerate over the coming months. As its spokesman
Chris Hughes says: "It’s embedded itself to an extent where it’s hard
to get rid of."

All of the above would have been enough to make me reject Facebook for ever. But there are more reasons to hate it. Many more.

Facebook is a well-funded project, and the people behind the
funding, a group of Silicon Valley venture capitalists, have a clearly
thought out ideology that they are hoping to spread around the world.
Facebook is one manifestation of this ideology. Like PayPal before it,
it is a social experiment, an expression of a particular kind of
neoconservative libertarianism. On Facebook, you can be free to be who
you want to be, as long as you don’t mind being bombarded by adverts
for the world’s biggest brands. As with PayPal, national boundaries are
a thing of the past.

Although the project was initially
conceived by media cover star Mark Zuckerberg, the real face behind
Facebook is the 40-year-old Silicon Valley venture capitalist and
futurist philosopher Peter Thiel. There are only three board members on
Facebook, and they are Thiel, Zuckerberg and a third investor called
Jim Breyer from a venture capital firm called Accel Partners (more on
him later). Thiel invested $500,000 in Facebook when Harvard students
Zuckerberg, Chris Hughes and Dustin Moskowitz went to meet him in San
Francisco in June 2004, soon after they had launched the site. Thiel
now reportedly owns 7% of Facebook, which, at Facebook’s current
valuation of $15bn, would be worth more than $1bn. There is much debate
on who exactly were the original co-founders of Facebook, but whoever
they were, Zuckerberg is the only one left on the board, although
Hughes and Moskowitz still work for the company.

Thiel is widely
regarded in Silicon Valley and in the US venture capital scene as a
libertarian genius. He is the co-founder and CEO of the virtual banking
system PayPal, which he sold to Ebay for $1.5bn, taking $55m for
himself. He also runs a £3bn hedge fund called Clarium Capital
Management and a venture capital fund called Founders Fund. Bloomberg
Markets magazine recently called him "one of the most successful hedge
fund managers in the country". He has made money by betting on rising
oil prices and by correctly predicting that the dollar would weaken. He
and his absurdly wealthy Silicon Valley mates have recently been
labelled "The PayPal Mafia" by Fortune magazine, whose reporter also
observed that Thiel has a uniformed butler and a $500,000 McLaren
supercar. Thiel is also a chess master and intensely competitive. He
has been known to sweep the chessmen off the table in a fury when
losing. And he does not apologise for this hyper-competitveness,
saying: "Show me a good loser and I’ll show you a loser."

But Thiel is more than just a clever and avaricious capitalist.
He is a futurist philosopher and neocon activist. A philosophy graduate
from Stanford, in 1998 he co-wrote a book called The Diversity Myth,
which is a detailed attack on liberalism and the multiculturalist
ideology that dominated Stanford. He claimed that the "multiculture"
led to a lessening of individual freedoms. While a student at Stanford,
Thiel founded a rightwing journal, still up and running, called The
Stanford Review – motto: Fiat Lux ("Let there be light"). Thiel is a
member of TheVanguard.Org, an internet-based neoconservative pressure
group that was set up to attack MoveOn.org, a liberal pressure group
that works on the web. Thiel calls himself "way libertarian".

TheVanguard
is run by one Rod D Martin, a philosopher-capitalist whom Thiel greatly
admires. On the site, Thiel says: "Rod is one of our nation’s leading
minds in the creation of new and needed ideas for public policy. He
possesses a more complete understanding of America than most executives
have of their own businesses."

This little taster from their
website will give you an idea of their vision for the world:
"TheVanguard.Org is an online community of Americans who believe in
conservative values, the free market and limited government as the best
means to bring hope and ever-increasing opportunity to everyone,
especially the poorest among us." Their aim is to promote policies that
will "reshape America and the globe". TheVanguard describes its
politics as "Reaganite/Thatcherite". The chairman’s message says:
"Today we’ll teach MoveOn [the liberal website], Hillary and the
leftwing media some lessons they never imagined."

So, Thiel’s
politics are not in doubt. What about his philosophy? I listened to a
podcast of an address Thiel gave about his ideas for the future. His
philosophy, briefly, is this: since the 17th century, certain
enlightened thinkers have been taking the world away from the
old-fashioned nature-bound life, and here he quotes Thomas Hobbes’
famous characterisation of life as "nasty, brutish and short", and
towards a new virtual world where we have conquered nature. Value now
exists in imaginary things. Thiel says that PayPal was motivated by
this belief: that you can find value not in real manufactured objects,
but in the relations between human beings. PayPal was a way of moving
money around the world with no restriction. Bloomberg Markets puts it
like this: "For Thiel, PayPal was all about freedom: it would enable
people to skirt currency controls and move money around the globe."

Clearly,
Facebook is another uber-capitalist experiment: can you make money out
of friendship? Can you create communities free of national boundaries –
and then sell Coca-Cola to them? Facebook is profoundly uncreative. It
makes nothing at all. It simply mediates in relationships that were
happening anyway.

   
               
         
            Photo: Tim Boyle/Getty
       
   

Thiel’s philosophical mentor is one René Girard of Stanford
University, proponent of a theory of human behaviour called mimetic
desire. Girard reckons that people are essentially sheep-like and will
copy one another without much reflection. The theory would also seem to
be proved correct in the case of Thiel’s virtual worlds: the desired
object is irrelevant; all you need to know is that human beings will
tend to move in flocks. Hence financial bubbles. Hence the enormous
popularity of Facebook. Girard is a regular at Thiel’s intellectual
soirees. What you don’t hear about in Thiel’s philosophy, by the way,
are old-fashioned real-world concepts such as art, beauty, love,
pleasure and truth.

The internet is immensely appealing to
neocons such as Thiel because it promises a certain sort of freedom in
human relations and in business, freedom from pesky national laws,
national boundaries and suchlike. The internet opens up a world of free
trade and laissez-faire expansion. Thiel also seems to approve of
offshore tax havens, and claims that 40% of the world’s wealth resides
in places such as Vanuatu, the Cayman Islands, Monaco and Barbados. I
think it’s fair to say that Thiel, like Rupert Murdoch, is against tax.
He also likes the globalisation of digital culture because it makes the
banking overlords hard to attack: "You can’t have a workers’ revolution
to take over a bank if the bank is in Vanuatu," he says.

If
life in the past was nasty, brutish and short, then in the future Thiel
wants to make it much longer, and to this end he has also invested in a
firm that is exploring life-extension technologies. He has pledged
£3.5m to a Cambridge-based gerontologist called Aubrey de Grey, who is
searching for the key to immortality. Thiel is also on the board of
advisers of something called the Singularity Institute for Artificial
Intelligence. From its fantastical website, the following: "The
Singularity is the technological creation of smarter-than-human
intelligence. There are several technologies … heading in this
direction … Artificial Intelligence … direct brain-computer
interfaces … genetic engineering … different technologies which, if
they reached a threshold level of sophistication, would enable the
creation of smarter-than-human intelligence."

So by his own
admission, Thiel is trying to destroy the real world, which he also
calls "nature", and install a virtual world in its place, and it is in
this context that we must view the rise of Facebook. Facebook is a
deliberate experiment in global manipulation, and Thiel is a bright
young thing in the neoconservative pantheon, with a penchant for
far-out techno-utopian fantasies. Not someone I want to help get any
richer.

The third board member of Facebook is Jim Breyer. He is a
partner in the venture capital firm Accel Partners, who put $12.7m into
Facebook in April 2005. On the board of such US giants as Wal-Mart and
Marvel Entertainment, he is also a former chairman of the National
Venture Capital Association (NVCA). Now these are the people who are
really making things happen in America, because they invest in the new
young talent, the Zuckerbergs and the like. Facebook’s most recent
round of funding was led by a company called Greylock Venture Capital,
who put in the sum of $27.5m. One of Greylock’s senior partners is
called Howard Cox, another former chairman of the NVCA, who is also on
the board of In-Q-Tel. What’s In-Q-Tel? Well, believe it or not (and
check out their website), this is the venture-capital wing of the CIA.
After 9/11, the US intelligence community became so excited by the
possibilities of new technology and the innovations being made in the
private sector, that in 1999 they set up their own venture capital
fund, In-Q-Tel, which "identifies and partners with companies
developing cutting-edge technologies to help deliver these solutions to
the Central Intelligence Agency and the broader US Intelligence
Community (IC) to further their missions".

The US defence
department and the CIA love technology because it makes spying easier.
"We need to find new ways to deter new adversaries," defence secretary
Donald Rumsfeld said in 2003. "We need to make the leap into the
information age, which is the critical foundation of our transformation
efforts." In-Q-Tel’s first chairman was Gilman Louie, who served on the
board of the NVCA with Breyer. Another key figure in the In-Q-Tel team
is Anita K Jones, former director of defence research and engineering
for the US department of defence, and – with Breyer – board member of
BBN Technologies. When she left the US department of defence, Senator
Chuck Robb paid her the following tribute: "She brought the technology
and operational military communities together to design detailed plans
to sustain US dominance on the battlefield into the next century."

Now even if you don’t buy the idea that Facebook is some kind of
extension of the American imperialist programme crossed with a massive
information-gathering tool, there is no way of denying that as a
business, it is pure mega-genius. Some net nerds have suggsted that its
$15bn valuation is excessive, but I would argue that if anything that
is too modest. Its scale really is dizzying, and the potential for
growth is virtually limitless. "We want everyone to be able to use
Facebook," says the impersonal voice of Big Brother on the website.
I’ll bet they do. It is Facebook’s enormous potential that led
Microsoft to buy 1.6% for $240m. A recent rumour says that Asian
investor Lee Ka-Shing, said to be the ninth richest man in the world,
has bought 0.4% of Facebook for $60m.

The creators of the site
need do very little bar fiddle with the programme. In the main, they
simply sit back and watch as millions of Facebook addicts voluntarily
upload their ID details, photographs and lists of their favourite
consumer objects. Once in receipt of this vast database of human
beings, Facebook then simply has to sell the information back to
advertisers, or, as Zuckerberg puts it in a recent blog post, "to try
to help people share information with their friends about things they
do on the web". And indeed, this is precisely what’s happening. On
November 6 last year, Facebook announced that 12 global brands had
climbed on board. They included Coca-Cola, Blockbuster, Verizon, Sony
Pictures and Condé Nast. All trained in marketing bullshit of the
highest order, their representatives made excited comments along the
following lines:

"With Facebook Ads, our brands can become a part
of the way users communicate and interact on Facebook," said Carol
Kruse, vice president, global interactive marketing, the Coca-Cola
Company.

"We view this as an innovative way to cultivate
relationships with millions of Facebook users by enabling them to
interact with Blockbuster in convenient, relevant and entertaining
ways," said Jim Keyes, Blockbuster chairman and CEO. "This is beyond
creating advertising impressions. This is about Blockbuster
participating in the community of the consumer so that, in return,
consumers feel motivated to share the benefits of our brand with their
friends."

"Share" is Facebookspeak for "advertise". Sign up to
Facebook and you become a free walking, talking advert for Blockbuster
or Coke, extolling the virtues of these brands to your friends. We are
seeing the commodification of human relationships, the extraction of
capitalistic value from friendships.

Now, by comparision with
Facebook, newspapers, for example, begin to look hopelessly outdated as
a business model. A newspaper sells advertising space to businesses
looking to sell stuff to their readers. But the system is far less
sophisticated than Facebook for two reasons. One is that newspapers
have to put up with the irksome expense of paying journalists to
provide the content. Facebook gets its content for free. The other is
that Facebook can target advertising with far greater precision than a
newspaper. Admit on Facebook that your favourite film is This Is Spinal
Tap, and when a Spinal Tap-esque movie comes out, you can be sure that
they’ll be sending ads your way.

   
               
         
            Facebook founder Mark Zuckerman (Photo: Paul Sakuma/AP)
       
   

It’s true that Facebook recently got into hot water with its
Beacon advertising programme. Users were notified that one of their
friends had made a purchase at certain online shops; 46,000 users felt
that this level of advertising was intrusive, and signed a petition
called "Facebook! Stop invading my privacy!" to say so. Zuckerberg
apologised on his company blog. He has written that they have now
changed the system from "opt-out" to "opt-in". But I suspect that this
little rebellion about being so ruthlessly commodified will soon be
forgotten: after all, there was a national outcry by the civil
liberties movement when the idea of a police force was mooted in the UK
in the mid 19th century.

Futhermore, have you Facebook users ever
actually read the privacy policy? It tells you that you don’t have much
privacy. Facebook pretends to be about freedom, but isn’t it really
more like an ideologically motivated virtual totalitarian regime with a
population that will very soon exceed the UK’s? Thiel and the rest have
created their own country, a country of consumers.

Now, you may,
like Thiel and the other new masters of the cyberverse, find this
social experiment tremendously exciting. Here at last is the
Enlightenment state longed for since the Puritans of the 17th century
sailed away to North America, a world where everyone is free to express
themselves as they please, according to who is watching. National
boundaries are a thing of the past and everyone cavorts together in
freewheeling virtual space. Nature has been conquered through man’s
boundless ingenuity. Yes, and you may decide to send genius investor
Thiel all your money, and certainly you’ll be waiting impatiently for
the public flotation of the unstoppable Facebook.

Or you might
reflect that you don’t really want to be part of this heavily-funded
programme to create an arid global virtual republic, where your own
self and your relationships with your friends are converted into
commodites on sale to giant global brands. You may decide that you
don’t want to be part of this takeover bid for the world.

For my
own part, I am going to retreat from the whole thing, remain as
unplugged as possible, and spend the time I save by not going on
Facebook doing something useful, such as reading books. Why would I
want to waste my time on Facebook when I still haven’t read Keats’
Endymion? And when there are seeds to be sown in my own back yard? I
don’t want to retreat from nature, I want to reconnect with it. Damn
air-conditioning! And if I want to connect with the people around me, I
will revert to an old piece of technology. It’s free, it’s easy and it
delivers a uniquely individual experience in sharing information: it’s
called talking.

Facebook’s privacy policy

Just for fun, try substituting the words ‘Big Brother’ whenever you read the word ‘Facebook’

1 We will advertise at you

"When
you use Facebook, you may set up your personal profile, form
relationships, send messages, perform searches and queries, form
groups, set up events, add applications, and transmit information
through various channels. We collect this information so that we can
provide you the service and offer personalised features."

2 You can’t delete anything

"When
you update information, we usually keep a backup copy of the prior
version for a reasonable period of time to enable reversion to the
prior version of that information."

3 Anyone can glance at your intimate confessions

"…
we cannot and do not guarantee that user content you post on the site
will not be viewed by unauthorised persons. We are not responsible for
circumvention of any privacy settings or security measures contained on
the site. You understand and acknowledge that, even after removal,
copies of user content may remain viewable in cached and archived pages
or if other users have copied or stored your user content."

4 Our marketing profile of you will be unbeatable

"Facebook
may also collect information about you from other sources, such as
newspapers, blogs, instant messaging services, and other users of the
Facebook service through the operation of the service (eg, photo tags)
in order to provide you with more useful information and a more
personalised experience."

5 Opting out doesn’t mean opting out

"Facebook reserves the right to send you notices about your account even if you opt out of all voluntary email notifications."

6 The CIA may look at the stuff when they feel like it

"By
using Facebook, you are consenting to have your personal data
transferred to and processed in the United States … We may be
required to disclose user information pursuant to lawful requests, such
as subpoenas or court orders, or in compliance with applicable laws. We
do not reveal information until we have a good faith belief that an
information request by law enforcement or private litigants meets
applicable legal standards. Additionally, we may share account or other
information when we believe it is necessary to comply with law, to
protect our interests or property, to prevent fraud or other illegal
activity perpetrated through the Facebook service or using the Facebook
name, or to prevent imminent bodily harm. This may include sharing
information with other companies, lawyers, agents or government
agencies."