The collecting mania begins with simple information such as age, name, Facebook ID and gender. It ranges to information about the friends of the app-user, their political attitudes, religious beliefs and dozens of other sensitive information.

The most companys do not even know for what purpose the data is collected. The co-founder of the Facebook app “Identified” – Brendan Wallace – doesn’t know for what the data will be used at some point. But he has the certain opinion that it’s important to collect the data, because he knows: “data is what anyone wants access to”.

This interesting article provides more information for you. There you’ll also find three interesting videos.

You can read the (english) laudatio or watch the video (german).

This is the short version:

The BigBrotherAward 2011 in the “Communication” category goes to Facebook Deutschland GmbH for systematically poking its nose into people and their relationships, behind the friendly facade of an ostensibly free service. Facebook stores the collected data in the US – access by secret services enabled, deletion disabled. Via its “friend finder” and “mobile app”, Facebook also grabs hold of email addresses and phone numbers from its users’ address books. The “Like” button on external websites, even if it is not clicked, betrays all page visitors to Facebook. With Facebook, a kind of “gated community” is sprawling across the net in which people are monitored every step of the way. It is governed by the whims of a corporation that is earning billions with systematic privacy violations.

Dave Winer inspired us with the idea of making a logo competition:

I need a badge for my blog that says “This is a Facebook-free Zone”. There are no Like buttons. No Facebook comments. No bugs that report to anyone at Facebook that you are here and have read this page.

If you design a logo that says exactly this you can send it to socialswarm@foebud.org

After we found a winner, we will write to companies and bloggers etc. and ask them to put it on their website (if they are indeed a Facebook-free zone)

We especially need the users, who know best, what they wish for. Since it is you guys that we want to get back in control, we also need your opinion on stuff.

We don’t want a world where most of the people can be manipulated by Faceboogle. We want all people to be responsible in their computer usage. Therefore it is especially you nonnerds who should take interest in our project and take part in deciding how our future social media platform should look like.

There’s plenty of things that you can do:

• you can participate on our voting platform, the The Liquid Feedback of socialswarm. We want you to have more than just your say on how the solution that everyone needs should be shaped. If you want an account for our Liquid Feedback send a mail to Leena(at)foebud(dot)org.
• you can translate pages in the wiki. Some of them (for example the main page) are already translated you can have a look how that works.
• you can join the mailinglists and onlinemeetings. Find out how