Apparently, anything you post on Facebook that as so much as mentions a political candidate or person holding office in the government will be sent off to Politico to be analyzed. It doesn't matter if it's posted in private or public. What is actually being handed over isn't mentioned, but it's probably safe to assume that anything posted on Facebook that mentions a politician will be sent to Politico, even private messages.

Facebook and Politoco say that this isn't an issue, since Google already does this with search results. The difference here is that Google only does it by IP address. Any number of people can be using an IP address. If you log in, you're probably fair game and it doesn't apply, but Google's approach is more opt in that Facebook and Politico's. Not to mention Facebook ties your posts directly to your real life information. When you send a message to someone from Obama, they're going to have it.

They're claiming all of this is automated and no one will read the messages before they're made anonymous, but that's a ridiculous claim. There will be scores of private messages containing identifiable information. People will use names, professions, and areas where they live in these messages.

Some of you might remember another large corporation that dealt with anonymous information called AOL. They released "anonymous" search queries, and guess what? It was quite easy to figure out who searched for what. People often searched for local things. Every "anonymous" users was given a unique identification number in order to identify the person doing the search. Because of this, it was rather trivial to find information about people in real life from anonymous data. Things like your real life name, location, banking information etc.

A company's claims of making data "anonymous" can never be trusted. Most companies can't even be trusted at all with data. Sony was infamous for leaking information with PSN, because it contained valuable information and Sony did things that a lot of angry hackers didn't approve of. There are bound to be people who aren't fond of Facebook and Politico analyzing their private messages and posts, and that information could prove extremely valuable to certain people.

We will just have to wait and see what happens with this. Will we see outrage from Facebook users, or is this going to be done under the radar? Will we see an opt out option? Probably not, as that would skew the results. Overall this is an insulting thing for Facebook to do and there's no doubt that both of them will be selling this information to the highest bidders. These kinds of data sets are invaluable for politicians, and now that anyone can donate as much money as they want, your private messages are for sale to the highest bidding politician or PAC.

allthingsd.com/20120112/facebook-gives-politico-deep-access-to-users-political-sentiments/
techcrunch.com/2006/08/06/aol-proudly-releases-massive-amounts-of-user-search-data/