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Data from StatCounter.

Did you know that most of Firefox's budget comes from Google? That is because Google pays the Mozilla Corporation, the for-profit arm of the Mozilla Foundation, a share of ad revenue gained by displaying Google as the default Firefox search engine. By most, really, one means "almost all": in 2010, 84% of Mozilla's royalty revenue came from Google, and royalties counted for $121 million of the Foundation's $123 million in income. Pretty good sugar.

The agreement expired in November. (It first expired in 2006, was renewed through 2008 and then again through 2011.) The rapid growth of Google's Chrome browser threatened the survival of Firefox. There was no obvious need for Google to continue to subsidize a principal competitor. This caused much handwringing—until this afternoon, when Mozilla announced, at last, that it had signed a "new agreement" to keep Google as its default search partner for another three-year period.

Few of us have ever paid for a browser, so it's hard to think of this in terms of ordinary business competition, but that is in fact what it is. And to the victor will belong the spoils of the enemy. With three years of deal in place, the prospects for the (sort-of) nonprofit Mozilla browser look better. And what happens beyond that?

Nobody who uses the Internet will deny that web users owe a debt to the engineers of Google. At the same time, Google has grown dangerously big for its colossal britches. Right now, in addition to its search engine, Google owns YouTube, Chrome, Google Books, Blogger, Picasa, Feedburner and Gmail and God knows what else, that's off the top of my head. Google bought at least 26 companies in 2011, across a broad spectrum of business activities. Google's ambitions do not stop there; their biggest acquisition so far, at $12.5 billion, was this August's purchase of Motorola Mobility; they'll be making proprietary phones and tablets next (though it's said this purchase was made in order to secure the zillions of patents owned by Motorola). There's no end to their resources, and correspondingly no limit to their attempts to dominate of every aspect of our lives online—which, increasingly, means our lives, period. Do we really want a single profit-making entity in control of this much of the Internet?

Google recently paid for a study carried out by Accuvant which concluded that Chrome is the "safest" browser against malicious attacks. And doubts arose not only because of the sensitivity of the recent negotiations between Mozilla and Google; the study drew criticism for having perhaps been specially designed to favor Chrome at the expense of Firefox.

But here we are, with Mozilla's main income stream extended again. It gives Mozilla three years to grow the foundation's fund further and look at new options. Meanwhile, one thing Google can do, for better or for worse, is spend money and not much notice doing so.

* * *

A substantial number of the Internet honchos with whom I spoke during this period didn't seem worried about the future of Firefox—partly because the mobile browser market is dominated by the open source WebKit rendering engine and its derivatives, which include Android as well as Safari and Chrome, and mobile is the future, everyone seems to think. Furthermore, Microsoft and its Bing search engine were surely poised to replace Google's alliance with Mozilla. Certainly there have been tentative moves in that direction already. (In addition, the Mozilla Foundation has a good amount of cash on hand.)

But even Android is not so open source as we've been led to believe; Google seems to be trying to have it both ways, playing the part of public benefactor, enjoying the open source "we're the good guys" PR while maintaining what amounts to very tight control over the software's development (here's a good chart illustrating how).

Open source doesn't necessarily preclude corporate control. Nowadays most open source code is produced by professional software developers working for big companies. Times have changed since Linus Torvalds first set out to create an unpatented and unpatentable operating system; as of 2006, two percent of the current Linux kernel had been written by Torvalds himself.

Jimmy Wales called it. "I think Firefox still has a strong negotiating position," Wales, founder of Wikipedia, wrote in an email. "I think Google won't let them go. Bing is ready and raring to go, well funded, and the aggregate share of the browser market held by all versions of Firefox is still 25.3% according to Statcounter. Does Google really want Bing front and center for hundreds of millions of users?"

A good point, except that Bing sucks so hard it draws blood. You can't sort standard search results by date in Bing. There is somewhat less SEO pollution than there is in Google search results but, big deal, when Google is apt to return ten or fifteen times the number of relevant results that Bing does, and date-filtered if you want. Bing's news results are anemic compared to Google's. There is no blog search function at all. And let's not even get into Google Books, which, I mean, that alone. If I were Google, I can quite easily imagine not caring two pins about Bing, at least in is current state.

It's hard to see how an alliance in 2015 between Bing and Firefox would benefit Mozilla much, or harm Google. If it is a revshare deal like the Google one, it's beyond likely that Mozilla's revenues will plummet anyway, because Firefox users will quickly learn to hop over to the Google website for their searches, leaving Bing without much rev to share.

* * *

So what, right? Why should we care about this? Well, we should care because these huge companies—Google, Amazon and to a lesser extent, Facebook—are increasingly in a position to wreck the Internets we've come to love and rely upon over the last 20 years. When the benefits that accrue to citizens come into conflict with the profit-making ambitions of the corpocracy, it has long been clear who will lose, absent an almighty fight. The unstable future of a dominant nonprofit, open-source browser is cause for concern to anyone interested in the preservation of the open web.

What is meant, exactly, by this phrase, "the open web"? Kip Hampton, author and Perl wizard, says it means a combination of three factors:

1) Free and open source servers and publishing tools, which means you don't need money to publish web pages, provided you have Internet access;

2) Transport protocols and other technical specifications that are not encumbered by patent or copyright claims (so that tools like browsers, servers, etc. can be freely implemented by anyone who is willing to put in the time to develop them); and

3) The general assurance that connecting to the Web means the ability to connect to all of it, without some intervening public or private authority filtering/blocking/throttling access to sites and other resources they don't like.

There are a lot of potential choke points there that could be exploited by a monopolistic corporation—one, say, in absolute control of browsers and search at the same time. In the U.S., attempts to kill the open web are being made not by political forces, but by forces intent on making you pay (or does that maybe come to the same thing?). Let's follow this out.

As Chrome gains the monopoly it seeks in the browser market—Chrome 15 just now became more popular than Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox, by some counts—that will create a very different set of problems from those posed by the earlier dominance of Microsoft's IE browser. Microsoft, unlike Google, never managed to stake out a controlling position in the search business; the nature of search is such that it automatically affects both online retail and social networks to a significant degree.

Even today, business software is Microsoft's bread and butter. Once Microsoft has sold you a copy of Windows or Office, that's it, you don't pay for it again until a new and useless set of upgrades comes along to be shoved down your throat. That is a very old-school manner of going about things that is liable to break down in the nearish future.

Because, in stark contrast, Google's business is the flow of information. When you watch a video on YouTube, Google makes money; on every Google search you perform, Google makes money; when you check your Gmail, even, Google makes a tiny bit of money, because there is an ad on there (for example, the one I just saw for the DeVry for-profit "university," which when you think about it, this whole thing is liable to make you pretty ill, one way and another, because you can't help but think, look, wouldn't it be better to pay something for these services, so maybe I wouldn't be a party to all these underprivileged kids getting tricked into a lifetime of hock to a load of tax-avoiding for-profit jerk-offs?).

Anyway, the point here is that Google’s true business is not search, but advertising. More than 96 percent of Google's $29 billion in revenue last year came directly from advertising. Google makes more from advertising than the whole country's newspapers combined. But Google News isn't producing a newspaper; it's aggregating and distributing and sometimes even propagating the results of work done by now-starving newspapers.

So. Ugh! The real question is, once they've got us by the cojones, what happens next?

Google does not have to stay free forever. (Free of charge, I mean. They are plenty free in the sense of unconstrained, what with their roaring Niagara of lucre and their eight corporate jets.) There is nothing to stop Google charging us for their services tomorrow.

We've never had to pay for a search engine yet, but if Chrome should take over completely, or nearly so, from Firefox and IE, that is a not-at-all-unlikely scenario. Google could absolutely forbid its search engine to any browser other than Chrome, for example, and if Google search maintains its absolute dominance—likely, for the foreseeable future, given that not even Microsoft with all its bazillions has succeeded in launching a viable competitor—no browser that literally does not include Google search would be usable, really. At that point Google could institute a paywall, of some sort. I think, really, would institute a paywall.

But that's not even the worst thing that could happen if Chrome were to achieve more than, say, an 80% market share. The worst thing is that then Google would be in a position to determine even more basic aspects of our ability to communicate on the web. (Theoretically, they threaten the open web even now, for they may conceivably be able to control who is able to see what websites just by shutting undesirables out of the Google search engine—or by promoting desirables to the top of results.)

Google seeks to host every document you write and every email you send, they want to show you every book, host your blog, host your photos, answer all your questions. Google offers, apparently, a competitor to Groupon. What the heck. I do not want the entire Earth to be blanketed in products made by Google, Apple, Amazon or any other soi-disant "builder" of "cool applications."

But that's what nearly of all today's other capitalists have done: exploit every advantage until it screams in pain, at all times. Not to have a solid business offering a good product at a fair price, not to be one among many, but to Take All and be the Winner.

Google search is the one indispensable Google product. There are tolerable alternatives to Gmail right now, and to YouTube, and there are more-than-tolerable alternatives to all the rest of Google's offerings so far. That means that if they get too greedy, we can vote with our mice; we're the assets, clicking and clicking, and we can take our clicks elsewhere.

But what happens when there's nowhere left to click to? Ruin is what happens then. Things get more and more expensive and difficult, and quality crashes and burns.

Exhibit A: Facebook

The best days of Facebook are far behind it. When was Facebook's best moment? I asked these all these youngs. One recalled, "Let me see, I was a freshman, in 2006" (causing me to inhale gin and tonic right up into my brains, practically). In 2006, because that was when you first got to put pictures up, she explained; before that, it had been just the one profile picture that you could have. "Before chat," said another.

For me, the charm of Facebook ended when my list of favorite books disappeared. The astonishing thing about the original lists of favorite things on Facebook was that you could instantly see anyone else in the Facebook land who was interested in anything on your own list. It was so surprising to discover this. Really popular things would show tens of thousands of devotees, but so many times, there would be just ten, or 100, or even two. Once in a while it would be a friend, or a friend of a friend, who shared a hitherto unknown and unsuspected taste for The Lost Scrapbook or the solo works of Yukihiro Takahashi. A magical thing. I friended a couple of complete strangers just because they were fellow Thurber freaks. These connections were random, unmonetized, unmediated. We can still do this on the Internet now—on Twitter, say, the new home of random and improbable connections—but not on Facebook. Not any more.

One day, my list went up in smoke. Poof! Perhaps there had been some warning, but I missed it, I visited but rarely. I had no backup list; it emerged that you would have to start over. Then, I was shocked to find, the new system accepted only recommendations linking to these Fan Pages that are anything but places for serendipitous connections: they're just marketing. Even when you've already met someone over a book you both like, there is a piece of the transaction to be got, if only in the form of a couple of Sponsored Posts on the right edge of the screen. Every day Facebook grows more suffocated with advertising; each interaction, each game, each moment you spend on Facebook is more and more clearly becoming like an ad-stuffed magazine, only you and your friends have to write all the editorial yourselves.

Facebook continues to "own" every bit of personal, private information we've ever put on there. As a nineteen-year-old Harvard student, Mark Zuckerberg offered other people's private information (gathered from Facebook's earliest incarnation) to a friend. I have all these thousands of emails, pictures, SMS, he bragged. "What? How'd you manage that one?" asked this name-redacted friend. Zuckerberg replied, "They trust me — dumb f**ks." The mystery is how anyone imagines Zuckerberg to have altered his original position by one iota. He told Jose Antonio Vargas in a New Yorker interview, "I think I've grown and learned a lot" since those instant messages.

His company's behavior indicates otherwise. The number of privacy scandals there is really shocking.

There are growing indications that people are fed up with the once-loved Facebook. Nicholas Carlson at Business Insider noted that revenue numbers recently leaked to Gawker look "a little light." Light, that is, given that Facebook looks to be coming in shy of the $4 billion in revenues it would take for them to "meet expectations" in advance of next year's IPO. $100 billion is the valuation number that has been floated for a number of months but I don't think they're going to get anywhere near that, for two reasons. One is the diminishing attractiveness of the feature set, as indicated above. Gone are the days when you could randomly locate some guy in Montana who loves The Book of Tea.

The other is that the bloom is off the rose for the youngs, as well, but in a very different way. Facebook was a novelty for twenty-somethings back in 2004; younger kids who grew up with it and are entering their twenties now are experiencing a certain level of burnout. They had Facebook all the way through high school, they already have two thousand "friends" and have long since grown tired of spending hours on the thing every day. For them, Facebook is liable to go the way of Hanson or Tamagotchis. It's not a new toy, but an old one.

But even if the IPO is postponed, or Facebook is forced to take the company public at a diminished valuation (like $80 billion or something!), there is no social network anywhere that is half as pleasurable or entertaining as Facebook once was, and Facebook itself has strangled the possibility of a new one developing, at least for now.

Exhibit B: Amazon

Amazon bought the first dominant rare book search engine, Bookfinder.com, in a pretty shifty-looking deal made in 1999, and then bought the next dominant rare book search engine, the Canadian Abebooks, in 2008. If you're surprised that Amazon owns Abebooks.com, that is understandable, since the word "Amazon" appears zero times on the home page of Abebooks.com. Perhaps Amazon is not very keen that we should realize that it is getting increasingly difficult now to buy a book online, new, used or rare, where Amazon is not getting a piece of the transaction. You'll be paying more, that's almost for sure, if you choose Powells or Barnes and Noble, though there are still very good deals to be had at eBay's Half.com.

Independent booksellers have been fighting tooth and claw since the late 1990s to avoid being swallowed up by corporations, but years of struggle have seen them reduced to sharecroppers. Fees for booksellers at Bookfinder were a flat $25 per month (except for really large inventories), with no commissions, but these days booksellers must pay Amazon through the nose, with a far larger monthly fee plus a hefty commission on each sale, plus they wind up eating quite a bit of shipping costs—that is, if they want the huge preponderance of online book buyers to see their inventory. And all this was deliberate. One saw it coming, even in 1996.

And this means that struggling independent booksellers have less money to spend on inventory and on restoring books, on printing newsletters and attending auctions. It means local used bookstores close. It means fewer experts know less about fewer books. It leaves us all very much poorer.

Kip Hampton articulated our current predicament very beautifully, I thought.

The concrete short-run benefit of saving $50 at the check-out overwhelms long-run concerns about what happens when the family-owned store down the street goes under [...] you can gas on 'til you're blue in the face about walled gardens, privacy issues, and dependence upon private unaccountable profiteers who can change the rules on a whim but those abstract arguments usually crumple when pitted against peoples' short-term needs.

[T]elling people they should do without some short-term benefit in order to gain a more important long-term one is a tough sell. Really, this is the heart of the challenge we face. People will flip over cop cars to stop some governmental agency from restricting their freedom but those very same people will willingly *give* that same freedom away to some private entity provided that they also get some short-term visible benefit in the process.

And so today we have Amazon, the biggest-box store of all, only the box is super far away where you won't see their slave-wage employees passing out in the heat.

They say it's an urban myth about the frog in the pan of slowly-heating water. Which I was very relieved to hear, if only because I've always found it so horrifying that anyone would have tried boiling a frog to find out. But it's a story that resonates all the same. Sometimes I feel like we're all of us in that pan, with the water having heated up to just past the steaming-Jacuzzi level.

* * *

The progress through Congress of the Stop Online Piracy Act has caused a very large number of people to sit up and take a bit more notice than usual. (SOPA has been halted for the moment in Congress, but only until Wednesday—again since canceled—but at some point there will be an attempt to weasel it through, so a call to your representative is possibly in order.)

If SOPA fails, it will be a hope-giving sign that citizens are waking up to the many dangers threatening the open web. It seems unimaginable, but it is in fact altogether possible that we won't get to keep this miraculous thing we've all built and are sharing every day.

Here is a really crazy idea. What if the global Occupy movement were to unite behind Mozilla, and other open web initiatives? For example, what if Mozilla's $100+ million Google dollars each year were to be replaced by an annual subscription paid by the many friends of the anti-corporate-greed Occupy movement around the world? You'd need 10 million people paying $10 per year, or you could have a tiered system like they have in public radio.

That is kind of how open source started in the first place, in opposition to the corpocracy. Kip Hampton described it this way:

[W]e came of age in a time when fighting the corporate stranglehold on software generally was one of *the* defining issues for anyone using or writing Open Source tools. We didn't just use (or write) OSS software because it was there, because it was popular, or because it it was free [...] there was a general agreement that we were providing an alternative to for-profit software and anything that even *looked* like it might lead to corporate control/co-option was strictly anathema. More to the point, we could just assume that everyone we collaborated with was on the same philosophical page because no-one who didn't already "get it" would even show up in the first place.

Its a different world now. People download Firefox because it's a great browser; even the most business-y business behemoths mostly use OSS server software because that's what everyone uses; proprietary scripting languages and development frameworks have largely gone the way of the dodo; yet we greybeards still act like everyone who shows up is naturally "on the team" and, thus, we don't need to explain why OSS is important.

The Occupy movement was united on the Internet. Maybe it could establish a beachhead for the survival of the open web, too.


Maria Bustillos is the author of Dorkismo and Act Like a Gentleman, Think Like a Woman.

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"Claire" quickly asked me to send her money by Western Union so she could come back to the U.S. and be with me, her "husband." Over the next three months, I kept up an ongoing dialogue via Facebook messages and chat in which I continually found ways to irk her by screwing up the Western Union payment, demanding she send me more photos and de-friend the other men on Facebook she'd added in hopes of scamming them, claiming I'd lost all my money during Irene, and repeatedly confiding in her that I had chronic diarrhea and hoped she would still love me.

Our exchange (minus a few superfluous messages) is presented verbatim below, with original grammar and spelling errors intact.

AUGUST 27

Claire Anrie: Hey, Andrie is my name, I am new to this whole online thing, please bear with mm. I just wanted to drop you a line to let you know that I am interested in getting to know more about you. I guarantee that I am a nice lady and know how to treat a man... I have a degree in Accounting and minor in Art. you seems to be a very down to earth man and I really admire that! .I guess I will leave you with this for now. I hope your day went well and I hope to hear from you soon. Thanks for reading this! I practically wrote you a book! Hehe! .

the only way you can get back to me is to write to me via my personal email address which is:

[MISSPELLED MALE NAME PLUS FEMALE NAME] at yahoo dot com

Teddy Wayne: Great! Do you need any other personal information from me? My phone number, address, anything like that?

Claire Anrie: do you have yahoo im so we can talk better

Teddy Wayne: I don't! I have an IM on my bank account but I would need to give you my bank account number and password. Do you want it?

Claire Anrie: where are you from? what do you do for a living and who do you live with?

Teddy Wayne: I am from New York City. I made a lot of money in banking and retired at age 30, and now I give my money away to charities and to friends and loved ones. I live on my own and am looking for someone to share my life with. How about you?

Claire Anrie:- am single
         – i sell art sriptures
         – and gold

Teddy Wayne: Where do you live?

Claire Anrie: florida
(Note: Her profile lists her as living in “Sacramento, California.”)

Teddy Wayne: Which part?

Claire Anrie: am i was tinking of relocating to texas
         where i was born
(Her profile lists her birthplace as Miami.)

Teddy Wayne: Come to New York! We have many restaurants, discotheques, nightclubs.

Claire Anrie: can you accommodate me?

Teddy Wayne: Of course!

Claire Anrie: do you think is proper fro you to do that

Teddy Wayne: Why not? We have known each other only a short time, but I feel I already know you well in some ways.

Claire Anrie: – am so much in love with you
         – am cool
         – i like a guy who knows how to treat a lady

Teddy Wayne: I would buy you concert tickets, stereo, red dress.

Claire Anrie: can you do me a favor

Teddy Wayne: I will do anything for you. What is it?

Claire Anrie: can you please loan me some money?

Teddy Wayne: Absolutely. How much?

Claire Anrie: 300dollars

Teddy Wayne: Sure! How do we do this?

Claire Anrie: i promise to pay you back

Teddy Wayne: I know, baby.

Claire Anrie: go to western union office and send it ok

Teddy Wayne: OK! What is Western Union?

Claire Anrie: do you want to tell me you dont know any thing about western union

Teddy Wayne: – I usually just give my friends cash when I see them or I mail it to them. Why don't we just do that?
         – Also Western Union is probably closed today because of the hurricane, silly.
         – But I can go on Monday when it reopens. OK?

Teddy Wayne: Yes, I will send it. Who do I send it to? Do I just give them your name or an address?

Claire Anrie: name olson david [Gives address in Malaysia]

Teddy Wayne: It sounds like you are traveling and might need more funds. I decided to send $2,000 in case you needed extra.

At this point, I decided to start testing “Claire” to see if she had access to more pictures, and make her work a little harder for her money.

Teddy Wayne: Can you send me another picture of your beautiful face while the Western Union delivery gets finalized, baby?

Claire Anrie: my pictures are not on mobile i will send them to you asap

Teddy Wayne: OK! I sent it. The name it is under is Larry David. Can you send me a picture now?

Claire Anrie: – where you not giving mtcn
         – i will be so glad to here from you now because i don't want to stress you anymore
Teddy Wayne: – Yes, I sent the money
         – I am so excited to see you when you come to New York

Claire Anrie: were you not giving mtcn at the western union office

Now I wanted to see how strong Claire’s love was for me. Would she stick with me through an embarrassing bout of gastrointestinal illness?

Teddy Wayne: Sorry, I had an attack of diarrhea before. The MTCN is [fake number].

AUGUST 28

Claire Anrie: it does not work...western union does not match it

Teddy Wayne: Sorry, one of the numbers was off—my mistake. However, I have just lost my house in Hurricane Irene, and it will cost several million dollars for repairs. Do you need the money very badly right now? I would like to save as much as possible for the repairs.

Claire insisted she needed the money very badly. I promised I’d send it as soon as she sent more pictures. She posted additional photos of the personal trainer on Facebook, but I asked for even more, thinking she had exhausted her supply. I also told her I had only $300 left after the hurricane. She asked me to resend the money to the same Malaysian name and address—she claimed she had “ranted an apartment” from David Olson. It was time to ramp up my supposed illness.

Teddy Wayne: i am afraid you will stop loving me once you have to live with my chronic diarrhea. please tell me you will not let it get in the way of our love.

Claire Anrie: i wont i promise you my love

Teddy Wayne: thank you. it has gotten worse with the stress from the hurricane but i am only having "episodes" 12 or 13 times a day now.
         – but enough about me. how are YOU?

Claire Anrie: 24 and you?

Teddy Wayne: 32. i have had the chronic diarrhea since i was 24, though, so we have something in common!

Claire Anrie: what we have in common is love

Teddy Wayne: yes. love, and your age being the age when i developed chronic diarrhea.

Claire Anrie: – and i will always be there for you my love
         – honey when are you sending me the money i asked you?

Teddy Wayne: – i cannot wait. the happiness i receive will overpower this episode of diarrhea i am currently undergoing.
         – i have sent it already and will give you the MTCN when i see the pics and know that your love for me is true

Claire Anrie: dont let it lost the wa you did the last one you sent

Teddy Wayne: – i won't this time
         – do you need some more money? is that enough?

Claire Anrie: that is okay for me

Teddy Wayne: no, you have been so nice about not leaving me because of my chronic diarrhea, i am going to add another $1,000 to it, ok?

Claire Anrie: honey you are killing me with this

Teddy Wayne: – with what?
         – the diarrhea? i thought you didn't care about it?

Claire Anrie: the money

Teddy Wayne: you are worth it, baby. where are you now?

Claire Anrie: am still in malaysia and you my husband?

Teddy Wayne: still in NYC. my diarrhea clinic is here so i pretty much have to stay here.

Claire Anrie: am sending the pictures now

Teddy Wayne: great! i was about to run to the toilet but will wait for these because i am so excited.

Claire Anrie: ok

Teddy Wayne: i hope you are not sending pics to the other men you are friends with on facebook, my wife.

Claire Anrie: know i am not the type my love

Teddy Wayne: – will you take them off as your friends then, my love? i cannot bear the thought of other men talking with you
         – or even seeing your pictures up here

Claire Anrie: do you mean you are not giving me any money if you dont see my new pics?

Teddy Wayne: i have to go to my diarrhea doctor's appointment now, but i will be back later and hope the pictures are waiting for me and that you are no longer friends with these men. goodbye for now, my wife...

Claire Anrie: that show you dont love me as you always says

She quickly sent new photos, but didn’t de-friend the other men. I told her I would send the Western Union details once she did.

SEPTEMBER 12

Claire Anrie: They all wanted to be just friends that all but you are special i can never cheat on you my husband..

Teddy Wayne: It makes me jealous, my wife. I will give you the MTCN when you are fully mine, my love... only you understand me completely, and don't care about my chronic diarrhea. For that I will always love you.

She de-friended the men, and I sent her another fake MTCN, and later said I may have made yet another mistake on it.

SEPTEMBER 15

Claire Anrie: honey why are you acting this way i can find the money

Teddy Wayne: you said "i can find the money." so you did indeed find it? great! i hope it's enough for you. tell me what you're spending it on! I would've spent it on diarrhea medication because I have so much diarrhea! I hope you spent it on something nice, too!

SEPTEMBER 17-19

Claire Anrie: Stop fooling me i found nothing there if you know is hard for you to help me out you could have let me know than fooling me i gave you my heart my soul my everything why treating me like this?

Teddy Wayne: Baby, when you write like that you exacerbate my chronic diarrhea. The money IS there—I told you, it's under a different MTCN. Do you want the new MTCN?

Claire Anrie: Just tell if you don't have money to give me than wasting my time

Teddy Wayne: Baby, something scary happened. When I went to Western Union to send the money, they told me they are getting a lot of scams lately, and they said they were working with police in Malaysia to capture a man named David Olson. They asked me if I wanted to send the police after him. I said no, I have only been emailing with my one true love. Please tell me there is no problem with David Olson so that I can tell the police not to go after him! This is making my diarrhea a million times worse from the stress (stress-induced diarrhea)!

Claire Anrie: Nothing is wrong with him. like i told you he just helping me out...why are you doing this to me despite the promises you have made to me why not furfull it is unfair

Teddy Wayne: The police are so scary and it makes my diarrhea, which as you know is chronic, worse. Western Union won't let me send to David Olson so I need another name. P.S. My diarrhea has gone down to only eight episodes per day! Maybe by the time you get here I can knock it down to five or six?!

SEPTEMBER 22

Claire Anrie: Why can't you try money order if western union does not allow you to send the money to me via them do it now cos i can't wait to see you

Teddy Wayne: Because now they know I was trying to send to David Olson before so they won't let me send just a regular order. I need another name to give them. Why can't I send it to Claire Anrie? All these problems give me DIARRHEA!!!

Claire provided me with a different name to send the money to in Malaysia.

SEPTEMBER 30

Claire Anrie: honey please don't hurt me this time cos i need to get some things done with the money you are sending to me...i love you so much my dear

Teddy Wayne: My love, why are you now friends with men named Brad and Kevin and Cici? You are not cheating on me with them, are you? If not, why do you need to be friends with them? I love you and don't want jealousy to make me have more chronic diarrhea...

Claire Anrie: We were just friends...have you sent the money

Teddy Wayne: De-friend them and I will give you the new MTCN! I am so excited to see you, my love! My diarrhea is nearly gone—just two episodes in the past hour!

OCTOBER 5-8

Claire Anrie: Must i de-friend them before you give me money why are you acting this way you know you are all i have please forget about them i swear i won't let you down i promise

Teddy Wayne: I do not like the thought of my wife being friends with different men. Once you de-friend them I will give you the MTCN, my love, and my diarrhea will cease flowing like a river in winter...

Claire Anrie: Forget about the money and leave me alone please i beg you

Teddy Wayne: I can't stop thinking about you, baby. Will you take me back if I send you the money?

Claire Anrie: I don't want your money keep it to yourself please stay away from me you can't give me money and you always say you love me

Teddy Wayne: I have sent the money, baby. If you want me to give you the MTCN, just say so. If not, I understand, but know that I will always love you, in part because of how you loved me despite my chronic diarrhea.

OCTOBER 10

Claire Anrie: ok let me have the mtcn numbers so i can get the money

Teddy Wayne: My Internet keeps stopping in the middle of typing, so I hope you get this full email. The MTCN is 1056

OCTOBER 12

Claire Anrie: please tell me what is really wrong with you? why are you fooling me with mtcn please stop this shit

OCTOBER 13

Teddy Wayne: So as you know, I suffer from chronic diarrhea. My medication and treatment costs me a lot of money. I have enough to either give it to you or pay for my medication this month. I don't know what to do. I need you to help me decide. Should I give it to you, or should I pay for my chronic-diarrhea medication?

OCTOBER 17-19

Claire Anrie: divide it into two pay your bills and sort me out i just don't want to stay in that country anymore

Teddy Wayne: Sounds great! Which country are you in, again?

Claire Anrie: an asian country called malaysia

Teddy Wayne: I have not heard of it. Is it in Europe?

I was fortunate enough to receive a Whiting Writers’ Award, which comes with a very generous $50,000 prize. I capitalized on the announcement to prove to Claire that I had money I could send to her, and sent a link to an article about the prize.

OCTOBER 27-NOVEMBER 2

Teddy Wayne: Look, baby—I won $50,000! Aren't you proud of me?!

Claire Anrie: i am so happy for you but honey what matters most is how to get me out of here honey

Teddy Wayne: I can transfer the entire $50,000 to you immediately. Should we do that? I can't wait to see you and hope that our uniting alleviates my chronic diarrhea!

Claire Anrie: – Just get me out of here that is all i want you to do for me my husband.
         – Just get me out of here that is all i want you to do for me my husband.

Teddy Wayne: My wife, why did you send that last message twice? Did you mean for the second one to negate the first, so that you really DON'T want me to get you out of there? I don't understand!!!

Claire Anrie: how much do you have with you now so i can ask my friend to add to it and pay her back when i get to the state

Teddy Wayne: I have $50,001. I made another dollar yesterday.

Claire continued to ask for the MTCN, and I continued to claim I’d sent it, until I finally called her on her bluff, linking to the Facebook page of the personal trainer whose photos she used—but feigned continued ignorance.

NOVEMBER 22

Teddy Wayne: My wife, look what I found: more pictures of you! You go by a different name here. Why don't you use this name instead of Claire Anrie? And it says you are already in New York. I can't wait to meet you! Do you want to meet for coffee tomorrow?

NOVEMBER 28

Claire Anrie: an not the one who is using those pictures of mine you said you saw

Claire Anrie: honey how are you doing?

Teddy Wayne: – hi honey!
         – how are you doing? that's what Joey says from "Friends"!

Claire Anrie: lol not me honey

Teddy Wayne: lol! what are we laughing about? and who used those pictures of that girl who looks like you?

Claire Anrie: i swear honey not me

Teddy Wayne: but who is she? why does she have all these pictures of you? is she pretending to be you?

Claire Anrie: – yes honey
         – have i ever lied to you my husband?

Teddy Wayne: no, you have never not lied to me, honey. we should tell Facebook about this—it is a very serious crime to impersonate someone else. we should send her to jail!

Claire Anrie: can you do that my love?

Teddy Wayne: easily. we just tell them someone is pretending to be my wife, and they will track where she is writing from and send the police to find her. it is very easy. the penalty is 10-25 years in jail for cyber-crimes. this will be so fun! should I do it?

Claire Anrie: – ok honey
         – when are you intending to do that for me my heart

Teddy Wayne: OK, I have sent the alert, and they immediately replied that they are investigating the issue. I am so glad you were telling me the truth, my wife, and that we are catching the guilty person who is pretending to be you.

Claire Anrie: ok my love

Teddy Wayne: Look, my left ventricle, she is also using your photos here: [Link to non-Facebook site with the woman's pictures]

Claire Anrie: honey please am sick and tired of all this

Teddy Wayne: – I know, I am very upset, too. She used them here as well: [another link]
         – Isn't this awful that she would do this in so many places?
         – What should we do, my aorta?

Claire Anrie: – you know what matters most my dear
         – once you have me on your mind

Teddy Wayne: You mean fears of my chronic diarrhea ruining everything? Or our love, eternal as the universe, vast as the ocean, gentle as a mountaintop spring breeze? Or, again, my chronic diarrhea?

Claire Anrie: honey how do you want me to please you?

Teddy Wayne: Help me put in jail this woman who is pretending to be you! Can you believe people like that exist? She is probably doing it to get money, I bet. I am so glad you would never do that, my loving heart wife human female. Diarrhea.

Claire Anrie: – i will chat with you later honey
         – talk to you later my heart desire

Teddy Wayne: Did you get the money? I sent it last week.

Claire Anrie: i swear my love i cant find the money you have been sending to me my husband

Teddy Wayne: You know what happened? I thought this other woman was a name you went by, so I sent it to her name. Do you think you can get it since it's under her name?

I have not heard from Claire—my wife, my heart, my love—since, and when I checked recently, she had closed her Facebook account.

Teddy Wayne is the author of the novel Kapitoil and the winner of a 2011 Whiting Writers’ Award.

Photo by AXL, via Shutterstock.

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Mark Zuckerberg: "Recently, the US Federal Trade Commission established agreements with Google and Twitter that are helping to shape new privacy standards for our industry. Today, the FTC announced a similar agreement with Facebook."

The government: "The social networking service Facebook has agreed to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that it deceived consumers by telling them they could keep their information on Facebook private, and then repeatedly allowing it to be shared and made public. The proposed settlement requires Facebook to take several steps to make sure it lives up to its promises in the future."

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• This explanation of the advent of "frictionless sharing" on Facebook led naturally to a conversation about how Facebook cookies work, including when you're logged out of Facebook. And it was met with a rather strange reaction from a Facebook employee, who wrote: "Generally, unlike other major Internet companies, we have no interest in tracking people. We don’t have an ad network and we don’t sell people’s information." That's... absurd; Facebook is both an ad platform and an ad network, and has a pro level Facebook Ads (with, like, salespeople!) system and a self-managing, amateur-level ads system. (Also, you know: Nielsen Facebook ratings exists now?) While many of Facebook's tracking systems has to do with non-advertising purposes, this is wildly beside the point.

• So now we have delightful products like the Washington Post's "Social Reader app" (that's what they call their newspaper on the Facebook. When you read their stories on that, it reports on you reading them to your friends! Isn't that handy? Auto-broadcasting. Lifestreaming basically! Writes developer Michael Donohoe: "Earlier this year when I was still at the Times we talked to Facebook about a news app. Facebook had a whole set of new features in the pipeline (presumably just launched) and this passive reading action was one of them and they were pushing hard for us to use it." Heh. But it's apparently fine for the Washington Post.

• And then there's the nutso trending in third-party apps. Color and Spotify's permissions are insane; half the stuff you can interact with via Facebook (and Twitter!) is like "We can add friends and post to your wall and call your mom!"

What can/should you do? Well, you can laboriously keep up with changes in policy and privacy, for starters. It's boring maintenance, like trimming your nose hair, which you should probably also do soon. This is a good explainer. Spoiler: start here, with your app settings, and delete everything you don't love. But guess what! This is just the beginning. Just turn on your webcam and rip off your shirt, let's just get this over with.

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1. Sometimes we’re going to use your picture and your name in ads. Maybe we’ll tell your friends, “Hey guys! This guy over here likes this thing, shouldn’t you?” It makes people buy more shit if we trick them like that. Since we’re going to use your name and picture one way or the other, it’s probably better if you tell us how you do and don’t want it used.
2. Seriously, though, we promise not to tell advertisers anything about you without your permission. See? When you get to know us, we’re not so bad.
3. On the other hand, we don’t have to tell you shit, either. Sometimes you’ll see something that looks like an ad, but maybe it isn’t, and you’ll be like, “Is that an ad, Facebook?” and we’ll be like, “…Good question.”

—Finally someone made Facebook's Terms of Service intelligible. In four parts.

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But you knew what would happen anyway: 2012 candidates have certainly rushed to Facebook, along the way proving that some understand the platform better than others.

A candidate's Facebook gallery can make him or her look more presidential, or less, introduce a family, or showcase the humanity of a person whose very job requires him or her to be soulless.

For example, here's Democratic Florida Senator Bill Nelson, up for reelection in 2012, caring about another human being.

Facebook is also a great place to deflect criticism by portraying your concerns as exactly the opposite of your political focus. For example, here's Michigan GOP Presidential primary candidate and Congressman Thaddeus McCotter openly caring about children, which is a perfect balance to his 2007 "no" vote for the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.

Or, from his official Facebook page, here's Wisconsin's Scott Walker reading to a bunch of black schoolchildren—right around the time that the governor cut hundreds of millions in public school funding.

Your Facebook profile is also a perfect place to create a fictionalized version of your supporters. Here's incumbent Republican Indiana Senator Dick Lugar with a black kid.

Essentially, a Facebook page can depict a politician as he pretends to be, not as he really is. It is a commonality that pols' Facebooks are heavy with photos of regular folk interaction and light on, say, meetings with lobbyists. Nobody has an album titled "Fundraising."

"Issues photos" are also a great add to any office-holder's Facebook. Here's concerned Wyoming Senator John Barrasso surveying our porous border from an album titled "Barrasso on the Border."

Also, Facebook is a great place to feature your participation in the kinds of important, candidacy-defining events the "lamestream" media doesn't give a whoop about. This means if you're Thaddeus McCotter, you can create a whole album dedicated to your address at the Victims of Communism Memorial Ceremony.

Or, you can use your profile to tell voters something about yourself that may be awkward in the context of an official campaign event. For example, if you're recovering alcoholic and Minnesota Congressman Erik Paulsen, add a picture of yourself at a Hazelden clinic.

Facebook is also a great place to highlight your party bona fides. For Republicans, there's nothing more desirable in a Profile Pictures gallery than a shot of oneself in the same room with His Holiness, Ronald Reagan. Orrin Hatch, Newt Gingrich and Jon Huntsman are so lucky. (Yes, Orrin Hatch has a very active Facebook page.)

It also doesn't hurt to throw in a few little meta-photo ops, such as yourself with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. For example, from their respective pages, Utah Senator Orrin Hatch and Arkansas Senator Mark Pryor pretend like they're people Zuckerberg consults about things.

Your Facebook profile is also an excellent place to introduce the voting public to the best face of your family. From her profile, here's New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand in a shot that alternatively runs in the October Sears catalog.

But there is such thing as making the family look overly colloquial. Case in point, Ron Paul's official shot of his family.

Be careful not to be too perfect though, here's the Christmas Card added to Tim Pawlenty's profile. Can you tell which one is his wife and which two are the daughters?

See, Michele Bachmann was wise not to upload this photo to her Facebook profile, as it may portray an un-presidential element of the family dynamic. It's just fine where it is at her husband's "Meet Dr. Bachmann" clinic page.

There is also the issue of whether or not to allow open comments. Some candidates like Mitt Romney and John Boehner allow no outside wall posts, though they do allow comments. Sarah Palin allows wall posts, though she famously deletes those unfavorable to her.

When it comes to allowing comments, the inability to periodically edit your photos and wall posts could lead to some embarrassments. For example, this photo of Texas Governor and rumored Presidential candidate Rick Perry is accompanied by the comment "WHO HAS 2 THUMBS AND HATES WOMEN???? THESE GUYS!!!!!"

While it's obvious candidates themselves are too busy, or technologically inept, to work their own Facebook pages, they should take caution to vet the staffers charged with social media profile maintenance. Does a candidate for office of the most powerful position on earth want to be depicted with such impotence as this photo of Tim Pawlenty, which somebody on his campaign actually looked at and said, "Yes: THIS"?

Or how about this one of Rick Santorum, featured in the popular "behind the scenes" genre of pol Facebook pics. Is there a better way to make a man look as small as his ideas?

Then there is this one. It's bad enough nobody in New Hampshire thought to take down the King Kong poster before Cain spoke. But then it was uploaded to Herman Cain's official Facebook page by somebody on Herman Cain's campaign who clearly hates Herman Cain.

But politicians shouldn't let these pitfalls scare them away from social media. With a little practice, any candidate can learn to have a little fun with it. Just look at what Newt has been uploading.

Abe Sauer can be reached at abesauer at gmail dot com. He's also on Twitter.

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