When Mark Zuckerberg stood on stage last week to introduce

Facebook’s upgrades, the social media mogul essentially offered

this deal to his 750 million users: Hand over your data, your life,

your … soul.

When Mark Zuckerberg stood on stage last week to introduce Facebook’s upgrades, the social media mogul essentially offered this deal to his 750 million users: Hand over your data, your life, your … soul.

Since 2004, many of us have been happily paying for this free network with the bits and bytes of our lives. Our reward: An instant source of thumbs-up affirmation of every status update we post.

Rolling out now, a new “Timeline” format promises to document our lives, or as much of it as we’re willing to share and we generally share too much. The look of Facebook is about to change. “It’s your life,” proclaimed Zuckerberg from the stage of Facebook’s annual f8 developers conference, where he flashed tantalizing details of his own life.

The Timeline will likely appeal to the narcissist in most of us, but it’s another new feature that marks the real sobering crossroads. As you provide all of your Timeline life data, new “Open Graph” apps, Zuckerberg said, will expand the notion of sharing for a “frictionless user experience.”

It means that in the very near future, much of what you do online will be available directly through Facebook. One-stop shopping. That’s convenient. But Facebook, mostly through your “likes” and with its growing list of partners will track all of your shopping, listening and viewing and identify patterns so that it can suggest more things to buy, listen to or view.

Then, because this is a social network, all of your shopping, listening and viewing will be announced immediately to your friends. The “frictionless” part means that you’ll contribute to those valuable market-research patterns without even noticing.

And so “it’s your life” more blatantly than ever becomes “it’s your life for Facebook to exploit.”

Market research is nothing new. The concentration of data in the hands of one company is, though. The data provided by his 750 million users is marketing gold that will be parlayed into enormous financial gain for Facebook and its partners.

Swept up by the feel-good effects of “friends” and “like” buttons, 750 million of us have unwittingly allowed a business model that relies on our giving away information and then celebrating the “free” access we have to it.

Shouldn’t Mark Zuckerberg be paying us?

• MCT Campus