Apparently, if Facebook wanted to repair its reputation, all it had to do was seem like it was helping to topple an authoritarian regime. Now that the U.S. media is loudly pushing the idea that social media can change Egypt—and next, the world!—it makes Mark Zuckerberg's tendency to monetize every aspect of our online lives seem less important.

But the same apparatus that causes commentators to overstate Facebook’s importance to the Egyptian protests makes the service a growing threat to our ability to control our own identities. Facebook makes other people’s previously-invisible mass of interpersonal interactions into something visible—something that can be quantized, aggregated, sold, tracked and controlled. [...]