Investors will pressure Facebook, the public company, to find new ways of making money from users' personal data. If times get hard, can Facebook do that without endangering user privacy?

“If the product is free, you are the product.” 

At first glance that little maxim might seem cryptic, but it’s an apt description of the nature of Facebook’s service, and a needed heads-up for anyone who uses it. Although Facebook is a free service, the social networking site acts as a mechanism for capturing highly personal user information--Facebook's real product. That's your information. You are the product. 

All of the discussion and speculation surrounding the Facebook IPO over the past month has served as an introduction to the new “personal data economy” for many people. Facebook--and a thousand other smaller companies like it--are in the business of collecting and monetizing personally identifiable information (aka PII).