The real threat of facebook is the BI layer on top of facebook warehouse. The facebook datewarehouse contains the behavior, not just the thinking, but also the behavior of somewhere nearing a billion people. The business intelligence layer on top of it which is just all that code they get to run covered by the terms of service that say they can run any code they want "for improvement of the experience".
The business intelligence on top of facebook is where every intelligence service of the world wants to go. Imagine that you are a tiny little secret police organisation in some not very important country. Let's put ourselves in their position. Let's call them...I don't know what, you know ... "kirghistan". You are a secret police. You are in the "people business". Secret policing is "people business". You have classes of people that you want. You want agents, you want sources. You have adversaries, and you have influencables. That is people you torture who are related to adversaries. Wives, husbands, fathers, daughters; you know those people. So you are looking for classes of people. You don't know their names, but you know what they are like. You know who is recrutable for you as an agent. You know who are likely sources. You can give the social characteristics of your adversaries, and once you know your adversaries, you can find the influencables. So what you want to do is run code inside facebook. It will help you find the people that you want. It will show you the people whose behavior and whose social circles tell you that they are what you want. By way of agents, sources, what their adversaries are, and who you can torture to get to them.
So you don't want data out of facebook. The day you have data out of facebook, it is dead. You want to put code into facebook, and run it there, and get the results. You want to cooperate.
Facebook wants to be a media company. It wants to own the Web. It wants you to punch "like" buttons. "Like" buttons are terrific even if you *don't* punch them because they are web bugs. Because they show facebook every other webpage that you touch that has a like button on it. Whether you punch it or you don't, they still get a record.
The record is:
"you read a page, which had a like button on it"
and either you said yes, or you said no.
And either way, you made data. You taught the machine. So media want to know you better than you know yourself, and we shouldn't let anybody do that. We fought for a thousand years for the internal space. Tthe space where we read, think, reflect, and become unorthodox inside our own minds. That's the space that everybody wants to take away.
