You have friended Mark Zuckerberg, telling him everything about yourself that you have ever told to any of your friends.  More, actually, because an analysis of your social graph reveals much about you that you might not want to ever reveal to anyone else: your sexual preference and fetishes, your social class, your income level – everything that you might choose to hide is entirely revealed because you need to reveal it in order to make Facebook work.  Because you do not own it.  Because you do not have access to the source code, or the databases.  Because it is closed.

Your social graph is the most important thing you have that can be represented in bits.  With it, I can manipulate you.  I can change your tastes, your attitudes, even your politics.  We now know this is possible – and probably even easy.  But to do this, I need your social graph.  I need you to surrender it to me before I can use it to fuck you over.

In ‘Connected’ Christiakis and Fowler show how our behaviours are influenced and shaped by our social networks. Our online social networks are now ‘social graphs’ owned (largely) by Mark Zuckerberg. Marc Pesce links the two to reach a damning conclusion.

So if you thought that the purpose of Facebook was to enable you to make and keep in touch with friends, then think again.