Roboflirt

Cassandra Reno is 24 and lives in Toronto. I've never met the girl, but facebook informs me that she likes "shopping, photography, daiquiris, the beach and my itty bitty bikini" She's a fan of Hemingway and Entourage. Enjoys Mexican food. Oh, and she's absolutely gorgeous.

One last thing: she, out of the blue, wants to be my friend.

This is clearly a situation where my well-honed "too good to be true" reflex bailed me out. Someone like Cassandra Reno can't exist. So, deploying my maximum Occam powers, I can safely conclude she probably doesn't.

Well, there's more to it than that. There's the fact that we have absolutely no mutual contacts, interests or organizations... clearly the "add" request came out of some sort of search of the master database. And there's the small matter that every single one of the people who have recieved add requests and then blessed dear Cassandra with official "friend" status have last names that start with A and B. And that we've all been pulled from a collection of Canadian facebook networks, seemingly randomly. And that nobody has listed Cassandra as a friend from college, work or what have you--one honest chump at least deigned to give her the status of "facebook friend," while everyone else apparently saw the pretty lady and punched "add," no further questions.

Cassandra, in fact, shares a lot in common with Sam MacRoberts, who asked for my virtual acquaintance a day earlier. She's only 19, and hails from Aurora, just up the road from Toronto. But she shares Cassandra's mysteriousness, and most of all, her predeliction for befriending people on an alphabetical basis. Mind you, Sam's managed to chug her way through more of the alphabet, still sticking dutifully to Canadian networks only. It's almost as if she was keen to make friends with a certain demographic or something.

So, before I say any more, allow me to offer a few words to both these fine ladies. You're pretty and friendly-sounding and thus far I've seen no indication that you wouldn't be worth getting to know. Cassandra, I'd love to discuss whether you prefer Hemingway's shorter stuff or have an appetite for Grapes of Wrath in all its glory. Sam, you say that your relationship status is "complicated." Is there anything I can do to help straighten that out? So if either of you girls are reading this, drop me a line. I'd love to chat, and apologize profusely for what's coming next.

See, far be it for me to be rude or anything, it's just I think you guys are, well, several lines of automated PHP script.

Obviously, detailed demographic data is gold in the information economy. Pair it with targeted advertising and you have the reason that the founders of Google probably spend every second weekend rolling pricey call girls in high-grade cocaine, chicken drumstick-style.

And as sources of electronic goodness go, Facebook is far and away at the head of the class--unlike, say, myspace pages or Flickr accounts, you're getting clear indications that each entry corresponds with a living, breathing human being. Not only are there email addresses guaranteed to be in working order and checked frequently, but, depending on the openness of your subject, you've got all manner of fun information that you could harvest and cross-reference into some sort of massive database: dates of birth, hobbies, addresses, political opinions. Facebook accounts are also disproportionately drawn from an ideal demographics for consumer spending: college-educated and under 35, with comparatively few tight-fisted grannies watering down its commercial usefulness. And because personal names can serve as a delightful Rosetta stone in the field of information management, opening up opportunities to cross-reference, Facebook data is even more useful when acquired for use in concert with all the sorts of other databases flying out there--filling in the gaps over at MasterCard so they'll know when I turn 30 and can call me to offer a new savings plan, or letting MoneyTree calculate how much variation there is between my credit rating and that of my friends, or providing some context for Shoppers Drug Mart as to why I keep buying so much hair gel and condoms, or ensuring the direct mail people don't send me appeals to donate money to causes that will likely go ignored.

For the man in the basement somewhere who I suspect is steering Cassandra and Sam across the internets, hoovering up information, there's a veritable jackpot to be won, provided he can find buyers for his databases. And I'm sure he will.

I've been pretty steadfastly cynical of the paranoid nellies out there who are convinced that Google and Microsoft will use their data collection powers to overthrow human civilization. By and large, I believe Facebook when they swear up and down that they mean well with what they collect. But I don't think in coming years the major corporations will be the real troublemakers as this sort of data management gets more and more lucrative. I think it'll be the black economy: effectively the sort of people who spam penis-enlargement drugs today, with a few upgrades. Said information will get "laundered," merged, and recompiled, moving up through progressively less-sketchy tiers, until the likes of Google and Microsoft do buy it, for millions of dollars a pop, from entirely respectable Silicon Valley sorts.

And while legitimate businesses may not sully themselves with the extraction of this information, they'll certainly take of advantage of them after the fact. Imagine, if you will, logging on to the internet at the public library down the street, logged-in to no accounts, free from cookies. And based on what you punch into the search box, what sites you visit, and where geographically you're accessing the web from, Google's massive wheels are crunching all the while, narrowing down its list of potentials until they figure, within 80% certainty 19 times out of 20, that you're well, you (or maybe the guy from across the neighborhood who watches the same TV shows, but probably not). And that because your girlfriend's birthday is coming up in two weeks, you should see ads for things it figures she'd like and it figures you can afford. Knowing you're online, but not at your usual IP address, telemarketers around the world are signalled that you are likely not at home, and no wasteful calls are made at this time. Meanwhile, when you are noticed reading about vacations to Antigua, a signal is sent to a direct mail company to send vacation brochure to both your address and that of some of your friends... maybe they'll bring up how much they were thinking about getting away for spring break the next time you meet.

Orwellian terror? Not quite. But still a little creepy. And probably only five years away, thanks to the hard work of people like Cassandra and Sam.