Organizing and Influencing Field Metaphors and Privacy Consequences

From best to worst:

Grass Roots - When an effort is made up of volunteers who believe they are doing good for a common purpose.

Advertising - When one entity pays another entity to present a message.

Astroturfing - When an effort to influence and organize appears to be Grass Roots but is actually incited and financially or otherwise backed on the down low by some organization with a vested interest. This happens all the time when organizations with money want to make something happen politically.

Crowdturfing - When an effort influence is hidden and appears to be made up of individuals offering unbiased comment and endorsement via comment sections, social networks and other free means. This has always occurred on a small scale, of course, but now it's been named and gone corporate and companies are selling it as a service. Some folks think that a major portion of comments on all major online shopping sites are generated this way. I think those folks are probably right.

But here's my biggest fear:

SocialTurfing? RelationshipTurfing? FriendTurfing? - Pushing a message by systematically modifying content over what appears to be a netural common carrier. I fear Facebook will do this if they aren't already. There's a ton of money in manipulating which friend's messages appear at the top of each other's walls. Your friends influence your opinions more than any add can. Imagine you are a political moderate and Facebook sells the list of folks who appear as suggested friends on your wall. We all know folks who grind out endless posts at both ends of the political spectrum. I believe you are, in large part, who your friends are and the ideas you are exposed to. I don't know what kind of clever "turf" name this will end up with. I am quite sure it will be effective and very profitable.

While CrowdTurfing is made up of hundreds of one to one lies to try and get you to act, FriendTurfing slants the entire system to try to change your belief system/world view.

Don't think Facebook and their train wreck of a privacy record will do this? Consider Facebooks well known privacy abuses and the news that came out this week:

Facebook already collect unbelievable amounts of data, including shadow profiles for people who never even signed up, they delete nothing and claim that data about individuals is their trace secret even when requested by those individuals.

I wonder if we need a European style open records policy where individuals have the legal right to find out what a corporation knows about them. We shine sunshine on government all the time with open records laws. Why can't I know what Domonos pizza and my grocery store and, yes, facebook know about me and who they have sold it to?