A geek who conned his way into all our homes... by invitation

ASHIFTY-LOOKING college geek turns up on your doorstep. He’s in a hoodie and jeans, with unruly curls and bum-fluff whiskers, and you notice he’s slow to make eye contact.

Strangely, he’s carrying a booster seat, of the kind you use for kids in cars, but then he is a little on the short side. He has a most peculiar proposition for you. He wants you to let him into your home to rifle through all of your personal information.

He wants to go through your photo albums, your credit card statements, your purchasing histories and holiday destinations.

He’ll be looking in your wardrobes to see the sort of clothes you buy, rooting in your fridge to inspect your food tastes, he’ll examine your personal communications with friends and family, he’ll want to know if you’re thinking of changing your car, what kind of music you like, what movies you watch, where you went socialising at the weekend, with whom, and what you ate.

He’ll want to know if you’ve had your teeth whitened, your hair straightened, your eyebrows tattooed, he’ll enquire about your pets and how much you spend on them, your hobbies, your fondness for kitchen gadgets, your taste in soft furnishings.

Nothing about your life, basically, will be too trivial for this man to probe, note and store. Not even your mother, since you were a toddler, took this much interest in your likes and dislikes, your whims and impulses, but this geeky guy wants it all. And it may all take some time, which is why he’ll need to make himself comfortable on his booster seat.

And why does he want this? Because, he says, he wants to take all this information about you and sell it to whichever organisation in the world is prepared to pay him for it, so that they can remorselessly target you with adverts wherever you go – though often you won’t know that they’re adverts, because they’ll actually be disguised as news or recommendations from friends. You won’t get paid for this information, but he will. He’ll be paid a fortune.

You’d close the door in his face and scoff at his temerity, right? Well, wrong. Because if you signed up to Facebook, founded as a nasty college project allowing mean students to pass sarky comments about their plainer colleagues, you opened your door and you invited him in.

You might briefly have wondered, when you first joined this marvellous, ‘free’ social network along with all your friends, what was in it for Facebook.

You weren’t dumb enough to believe there was ever such a thing as a free lunch, but perhaps you compared it to a free-sheet newspaper, or a commercial television station. You enjoyed the content, in other words, and scrolled past the ads that, you assumed, were covering the costs.

What you never imagined was that when you let the geeky guy in you had, in the words of US Congresswoman Kathy Castor, struck a ‘devil’s bargain’ – you gave him all of your most personal data, and he sold it to the highest bidder.

HE wasn’t using it to ‘connect’ you with ‘friends’, he was providing it to whoever required it, for whatever purpose they wished. And if that ranged from flogging you a miracle anti-wrinkle serum to engineering Brexit to electing Donald Trump to declaring war on Russia, the geek with the booster seat didn’t care so long as the loot kept rolling in.

Targeted advertising, fake news, ‘IQ tests’ targeting your subliminal needs, skewed search results, subliminal messaging – a lot of people have put a lot of effort into extracting a very high price for that ‘free’ social network.

Facebook was one of the creators of the ‘fake news’ phenomenon, and this week, with jaw-dropping irony, it took to the old-fashioned newspapers to teach users how to spot it.

In full-page adverts, the company cautioned people to investigate sources, examine URLs, inspect dates, question claims, and look for corroborating reports – the basic tools, in other words, of the sort of quality journalism that Facebook has been so instrumental in undermining.

So if you want to trust your news content, then, if you want to be sure that bots, trolls and sinister manipulators are not leveraging your credibility, here is the advice from your favourite social network: either become an investigative journalist yourself, or, er, buy a proper newspaper.

Zuckerberg’s shiftiness, immaturity and curious detachment were apparent, this week, when he turned up at that Washington hearing with his booster seat and his sheaf of cog notes.

Cutting deftly through his waffle, one senator asked Zuckerberg if he’d be happy to tell them the name of his hotel, and let them see who he’d been messaging recently. No, he said, horrified at the very suggestion.

And yet when this geek turned up on our doorsteps a decade ago, offering his devil’s bargain, we told him all of that, and more.

So the question facing us today is a simple one. Now we know what he’s really about, do we throw him out on his ear? Or do we keep letting him rifle through our closets for personal information he can sell? And maybe make him a nice cup of tea while he’s at it…