Ex-staffer exposes Facebook's dark side

BANGALORE, INDIA: This revelation by a former employee of Facebook has brought to the fore the desperation of the social networking site to increase its user base. Facebook had developed an experimental feature that would give secret accounts to people who did not sign up. According to a book by former employee of the social networking site Katherine Losse, the feature called Dark Profiles was meant to get more people to log in.

People could be be tagged in Facebook photos even if they do not have a profile, and the idea was to create a 'dark' version which could apparently be activated if they finally signed up.

Engineers wanted to create shadow pages for those who were tagged in photos by their friends in the hope they would cave-in and join the social networking website, Katherine Losse, the author of 'The Boy Kings: A Journey into the Heart of the Social Network', said.

Losse worked for Facebook between 2005 and 2010, as customer relations officer and later as the speechwriter for its founder Mark Zuckerberg.

After forcing its Timeline feature on users, Facebook recently drew flak for changing the primary email of users without their knowledge. The emails of users was changed to facebook.com.