This to me is probably the first large visible salvo in the coming "personal information wars" I've personally predicted for some time now that we can expect to see for the next 10-20 years play out between corporations and consumers.

On the one side, you've got ad networks who are salivating at the thought and willing to pay big bucks in order to target tiny demographic buckets of consumers, but cannot get their hands on the necessary information, because consumers want them to fuck off.

Along comes Zynga, bless their hearts, who have cracked the code of human behavior in order to get consumers to do whatever it takes to keep playing their games. The poor bastards, after spending their last bit of disposable income on virtual cows and sheep are either willing to or are unknowingly handing over the keys to their personal information in order to keep getting their daily hits of the social gaming drug.

So, how does the personal information get extracted from the consumer and put into the hands of the ad network?

In the middle, you've got the granddaddy of all personal data warehouses, Facebook, whose future rests upon bringing consumers to their site in order to gather personal information for their ad platform or, more recently, to reap the cash cow of virtual game items through the credits system they're launching.

And finally, next to the advertisers, you've got the aggregators, who are jumping through whatever hoops necessary in order to get this information in order to provide it directly to ad networks through a nice, clean, fast API or tracking cookie for the ad networks to use.

According to the article allegedly they're getting the social gaming providers to send it along. So the circle's complete. If the story is true (and I'm not sure it is), they're basically keeping the social gaming companies profitable by either paying them for this data or allowing them to use it for more efficient advertising. Their survival makes Facebook happy, since it's driving more people back to the site and giving them more Facebook credit revenue. Facebook would never be able to build this type of direct-to-the-ad-network data pipe the ad networks need to operate, but certainly benefits from it existing.

What's happening here is what I'm going to coin right here on HN: "information laundering." Facebook doesn't give away your personal information, they give it to innocent gaming companies. Who then give it to aggregators. Who then give it to advertising networks. Plausible deniability for everyone!

It's almost beautiful how it's all come together, each member of this ecosystem now dependent on the next. If any single person pulls the plug, the whole thing comes crashing down. It seems the valley's created a monster. No, it's not a conspiracy. It's just everyone acting "rationally selfish." But this behavior should come as no surprise to anyone who has been watching the majority of the types of companies launching at conferences the last several years.

So, what's next? Here's the worrisome part. The aggregation and dissemination of this type of personal information has been up until now largely used (we assume) for benign purposes like advertising. But, we're now in an era where access to this information is easy (APIs) and access to massive computing power (AWS) and analysis tools (Hadoop) is cheap.

It doesn't take much of an imagination to come up with ways this information can be used for far more nefarious purposes than selling weight loss pills. Surely the politicians are already plugged into this in order to craft advertising to manipulate people into voting for their guy. But it could be much worse than this, of course.

The truth is, the "information trade" will likely have the same connotation as the "drug trade" for the Millennials as they get older. As soon as there is a mainstream story about how this type of leak has ruined lives, or directly led to large scale fraud, blackmail, or even violence, things will start to happen.

I expect the next phase of this will play out in the press (expect alarmist articles like this one to be followed with more alarmist news pieces on TV) until some politician (as likely a Republican or Democrat, for different reasons of course) takes it up as their pet cause. It will start as "think of the children!" but over the years this will turn into "think of us!" as the children turn into the adults.

I expect to see legislation eventually that criminalizes a lot of the practices going on today with regards to aggregating and transmitting large amounts of personal information.