Facewash: The only way to fix Facebook’s abuse of privacy is to devalue their data.

Short and sweet – the only way to fix Facebook’s abuse of privacy is to devalue their data.

As long as monetizable data exists, a company will try to productize it. This holds true for Facebook, as it does for every other corporate entity and even non-profits – this is simply the core nature of a business/organizational entity.

Bad press, high-profile people deleting accounts, micro-revolutions might win a battle over user privacy, but they’ll never win the underlying war. While some may turn to the government to legislate solutions, seasoned and jaded folks like me know two truths: legislation on technology always “gets it wrong”, and we have the best government that money can buy.

Anyone in the industry long enough can easily tell you that Facebook’s privacy measures aren’t enacted to increase user-experience — they’re enacted to open up the data for Advertising purposes. When information becomes “public” it’s not just open to view by other people — it becomes fair game for multiple monetization strategies: userbase analytics, non-anonymous user info and tracking, data brokerage to third parties, application-development or services by third parties, etc. As long as data is monetizable, companies such as Facebook will continually try to maximize the revenue they possibly can.

For a long time, social networks insisted on closed ecosystems — or so-called walled gardens — to keep their data safe. A recent trend in Data Sportability ( my term for the continued trend of companies releasing standards slightly more open than those currently most open) has seen these companies slowly open up to monetize in new ways — groups like Facebook assume that they’ve won the platform wars and want to increase their reach, groups like Google assume they have the most raw-computing power.

Whether the data exists on Facebook or another site becomes irrelevant – this is a cause & effect scenario that will continuously repeat.

So the only way to make privacy not an issue, is to make the underlying data irrelevant. Without the ability to monetize data in a meaningful way, there exists little or no reason to force egregiously open privacy protocols.

A really simple method of doing this — one I wish I had the time to execute on — is a tool that I would call “Facewash”. Here is how it works:

• A user drags a bookmarklet onto their browser toolbar, then visits their Facebook profile.
• Clicking on the bookmarket starts reading information from Facebook — such as their personal info, their likes and dislikes, etc — and sends it into the cloud as unrelated data.
• The bookmarklet then retrieves new unrelated data from the cloud, and walks the user through updating their profile — removing “Likes”, adding new random “Likes”, changing bits of their profile information that are not core to a user experience.
• The cloud based system could either try to send back as much of an ‘average’ profile as possible, or could try and create wildly conflicting profiles that would match edge cases of audience profiling.

The end result ? Facebook’s user profiles become worthless to advertising interests. When behavioral and social data starts to have a high probability of irrelevance to the represented audience, the marketing value disappears. Advertisers wouldn’t trust Facebook’s data, and if they did — they wouldn’t know how to market to people. Without the interests of advertisers, corporations like Facebook wouldn’t even bother trying to push for relaxed privacy settings any longer.

My only question is — anyone know a couple of JS developers who want to build this for me ?