by Karl Denninger
“Please break into my home, I’m not there, my stereo is rad and I probably have an iMac in there you can rip off too! Well, not quite. But close.After crossing the one billion user mark a few months ago, speculation ramped up as to how Facebook might further leverage its phenomenal growth. While talk of a Facebook phone and even a search engine crop up every few months, Facebook is actually engaged in a far more practical experiment: free Wi-Fi check-ins. The unannounced project was first noticed by Scotland-based developer Tom Waddington, who identified a line of text in Facebook’s Page Insights code referring to something called “social Wi-Fi.” Waddington then found an explanation of the code, which read, “People who liked your Page after checking in via Facebook Wi-Fi.” The developer surmised that this was a new Facebook option for businesses offering Wi-Fi to customers with Facebook accounts.
There is nothing more-stupid than “checking in” on a public web site with your location, date and time stamped on your access. Well, except maybe advertising in the local paper that you both have $100,000 sitting on your lap and you’re unarmed. The “enticement” to you is that you’ll get a whole 10 cents worth of “free” Internet access. The enticement to Facebook, of course, is that they get to sell a litany of your access patterns and locations to anyone who wants to buy them, along with, quite possibly (or probably!), your identity.
This is not hypothetical either, or at least Forbes claims it isn’t: “It’s no secret that Facebook treats your personal data as a commodity. But when that data ends up on the open market, you may be surprised at the price it fetches: in this case, less than half a thousandth of a penny. That’s the rate paid by Bogomil Shopov, a Bulgarian blogger and digital rights activist, for a collection of 1.1 million Facebook names, user IDs, and emails posted to the social marketing site Gigbucks earlier this month for a grand total of five dollars. “I just bought more than 1 million… Facebook data entries,” Shopov wrote on his blog Tuesday. “OMG!”
Just remember folks, when you intentionally put information into the public domain, well, it’s public. And when you give it to a commercial outfit in exchange for something they own it and both can and will sell it. You didn’t really think that Wifi access was free, did you? Don’t be stupid.”
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