This article titled “With friends like Facebook…” was written by John Naughton, for The Observer on Sunday 29th January 2012 00.06 UTC

Here’s an interesting coincidence. Last week, the European commission announced plans for a “comprehensive review” of the EU’s 1995 data protection rules “to strengthen online privacy rights” and “boost Europe’s digital economy”. The reforms include “a right to be forgotten”, which will, the commission claims, “help people better manage data protection risks online” and enable them to “delete their data if there are no legitimate grounds for retaining it”.

In the same week, Facebook made this announcement on its official blog: “Last year we introduced timeline, a new kind of profile that lets you highlight the photos, posts and life events that help you tell your story. Over the next few weeks, everyone will get timeline. When you get timeline, you’ll have seven days to preview what’s there now. This gives you a chance to add or hide whatever you want before anyone else sees it.” Note the authoritarian tone: “Everyone will get timeline.” Translation: you’ll get it whether you like it or not. We will return to this later.

Now you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see that there’s a serious collision ahead between the European commission and a powerful US company that is planning an IPO. And guess what? Facebook got its retaliation in first. The day before the commission made its announcement, Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, gave a speech to a technology conference in Munich. Her menacing subtext was neatly summarised by the New York Times thus: “Concerned about privacy? Maybe you should be concerned about the economy instead.” Translation: mess with us, Eurotrash, and we’ll screw you.

Sandberg’s speech was revealing because it exposes the line of argument that Google, Facebook, et al will use to undermine public authorities that seek to control their freedom to exploit their users’ identities and abuse their privacy. The argument is that internet companies create lots of jobs and are good for the economy and European governments shouldn’t stand in their way.

In laying down this line, Sandberg made claims about the economic benefits of privacy abuse that defy parody. For example, she unveiled a report that Facebook had commissioned from Deloitte, a consultancy firm, which estimated that Facebook – an outfit with a global workforce of about 3,000 – indirectly helped create 232,000 jobs in Europe in 2011 and enabled more than bn in revenues.

Inspection of the “report” confirms one’s suspicion that you couldn’t make this stuff up. Or, rather, only an international consulting firm could make it up. Interestingly, Deloitte itself appears to be ambivalent about it. “The information contained in the report”, it cautions, “has been obtained from Facebook Inc and third party sources that are clearly referenced in the appropriate sections of the report. Deloitte has neither sought to corroborate this information nor to review its overall reasonableness. Further, any results from the analysis contained in the report are reliant on the information available at the time of writing the report and should not be relied upon in subsequent periods.” (Emphasis added.)

Accordingly, continues Deloitte, “no representation or warranty, express or implied, is given and no responsibility or liability is or will be accepted by or on behalf of Deloitte or by any of its partners, employees or agents or any other person as to the accuracy, completeness or correctness of the information contained in this document or any oral information made available and any such liability is expressly disclaimed”.

Quite so. The sole purpose of “reports” such as this is to impress or intimidate politicians and regulators, many of whom still seem unaware of the extent to which international consulting firms are used by corporations to lend an aura of empirical respectability to hogwash.

The truth is that companies such as Facebook are basically the corporate world’s equivalent of sociopaths, that is to say individuals who are completely lacking in conscience and respect for others. In her book The Sociopath Next Door, Martha Stout of Harvard medical school tries to convey what goes on in the mind of such an individual. “Imagine,” she writes, “not having a conscience, none at all, no feelings of guilt or remorse no matter what you do, no limiting sense of concern of the wellbeing of strangers, friends, or even family members. Imagine no struggles with shame, not a single one in your whole life, no matter what kind of selfish, lazy, harmful, or immoral action you had taken. And pretend that the concept of responsibility is unknown to you, except as a burden others seem to accept without question, like gullible fools.”

Welcome to the Facebook mindset.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

Image credit: Nobihaya, Creative Commons

Related posts:

1. Instagram and Facebook: the next tech bubble?
2. Yahoo files lawsuit against Facebook
3. Tech giants have power to be political masters as well as our web ones
4. The Facebook IPO: billion-user ambition at a $100bn price
5. Facebook reminds Australia: Moderate your Pages

Tweet

1. PointZeroOne
   Posted 29/01/2012 at 9:47 pm | Permalink | Reply

   eh? read that waiting for the part about Australia, but it never came. Scrolled back up and it’s from a UK paper o_O

2. Renai LeMay
   Posted 29/01/2012 at 9:50 pm | Permalink | Reply

   From the sidebar (under popular stories):

   “Delimiter was created to focus purely on technology in the Australian context, and that’s what we’ll always do. But now we’ve also set up a separate section of the site featuring technology news from The Guardian newspaper in the UK.

   These articles won’t appear in the main article stream, which will continue to be just about Australia. But if you want the international news as well, now we’ve got that too :) Just click the links in the sidebar below.”

   • PointZeroOne
     Posted 29/01/2012 at 9:53 pm | Permalink | Reply

     And people read the sidebar? :P

     I just have habit of clicking Delimiter links from the Twitter feed

     • Renai LeMay
       Posted 29/01/2012 at 9:54 pm | Permalink | Reply

       It has a big fat logo of ‘The Guardian’ at the top of the page ;) Not sure how much more obvious I can make it.

       • PointZeroOne
         Posted 29/01/2012 at 10:05 pm | Permalink | Reply

         My reading habits for delimiter is as soon as page loads, scroll down past the image and straight to the text. So yeah didn’t see the logo.

         But now I’m aware of this taint on Delimiter I’ll be more wary of the articles….. ^___^

         • Renai LeMay
           Posted 29/01/2012 at 10:06 pm | Permalink | Reply

           heh well you can easily avoid the international stuff by subscribing to the RSS feed ;)

           • BrianD
             Posted 30/01/2012 at 8:38 pm | Permalink | Reply

             Taint is right.

             O well. delimiter was nice while it lasted.

             • Renai LeMay
               Posted 30/01/2012 at 9:07 pm | Permalink | Reply

               I’ll pass on your comments to the editor.

               • PointZeroOne
                 Posted 01/02/2012 at 11:24 am | Permalink | Reply

                 pfffft the Editor doesn’t listen to the readers!

3. Nich
   Posted 29/01/2012 at 10:05 pm | Permalink | Reply

   Quelle horreur! Online company updates software and refuses to support legacy systems.

   It’s like noting the authoritarian tone in the advertising for a food or drink product that comes in a specific and limited range of options.