Advice for using Facebook

My advice for everyone using Facebook (which includes me) is to at all times act under the assumption that one day the entire Facebook database will be in the public domain. People will just be able to download whole chunks of it via BitTorrent. This sounds crazy, but I suspect it will probably happen one day, and the logic is actually pretty simple.

The first thing to realise is that Facebook is not going to be around forever. Really. The idea of Facebook going bust probably seems unthinkable to a great many people today, but it inevitably will. Something will kill Facebook the same way Facebook killed Myspace and Gmail killed Hotmail and Google Translate killed Altavista's Babelfish and so on and so on. Obviously by "kill" here I don't mean completely eradicate, because those other services still exist, but they have many orders of magnitude less users, less revenue, less influence and less value in the public eye than they once did, so they're dead compared to their former selves. The internet is a dynamic place and nobody ever stays on top for ever. It goes without saying that Facebook's day in the sun will not last forever. It may last another year, but it probably won't last another 10 and it definitely won't last another 50.

The second thing to realise is that Facebook's data is going to be around forever. Nobody is ever going to delete that database, because it's just too valuable. It's almost unspeakably valuable. Marketing companies want it so they can better target advertisements. Governments want it so they can spy on their citizens (though most of them will say they want it to spy on terrorists instead). Law enforcement want it to help solve crimes, and lawyers want it to help win their cases. Politicians want it so they can dig up dirt on their opponents. Insurance companies want it so they can better assess how much of a liability you are to them. Journalists want it so they can uncover big stories. Employers and universities want it to help them screen their applicants more carefully. Gossip magazines want it because celebrities use Facebook. Criminals want it for use in fraud or blackmail. Facebook won't fall on hard times because their data isn't valuable anymore, they'll fall on hard times because their particular way of monetising their data won't work well once everyone stops logging into Facebook. The data will still be valuable to a lot of other people, so inevitably Facebook will sell the data to one or more other companies.

And some of those companies will one day fall on hard times and will sell off what data they have when it becomes the most economically rational thing for them to do, and so and so on. Nobody is ever going to think "Gee, it's starting to get hard to make money from this database in a way that is legal and ethical, we'd better cut our losses and securely delete the whole thing". Instead, they will sell it to the highest bidder. That data is going to pass through a lot of hands (and be used for a lot of things that the people who willingly contributed their data never dreamed of), and the global number of copies is only going to increase. The number of copies will increase, the mean computer security competence and sense of ethical responsibility that any one owner has will necessarily decrease, and the probability of data being lost or stolen or leaked will slowly increase over time, asymptotically approaching certainty. It's almost certainly going to get out into the wild eventually, and as soon as any fragment of that database hits Pirate Bay once, it will forever after be accessible to anybody who really wants it.

This means every status update you make, every message you send, anything you say in your chats, any photos you upload, and anything Facebook infers from this data (like their facial recognition models) may, one day, be easily accessible to all your friends and family, your employer (present and prospective future), your government, anybody who wants to see it. Your new boy/girlfriend will be able to read every conversation between you and your old boy/girlfriend, your new boss will be able to read everything you said to your workmates about your old boss, and anything you ever told just one person once will be public knowledge, even if that one person you trusted never told a soul.

Maybe I'm exaggerating the risk here and this isn't a certainty, but I do think it's a real possibility. It's not a one in a million long shot, it's probably much more like one in a thousand or even one in a hundred, and that's high enough to make it well worth factoring this possibility into all your Facebook behaviour.