One of the few coherent messages to emerge from the US Senate’s bumbling interrogation of Mark Zuckerberg was a touching desire that Facebook’s user agreement should be comprehensible to humans. Or, as Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana put it: “Here’s what everyone’s been trying to tell you today – and I say it gently – your user agreement sucks. The purpose of a user agreement is to cover Facebook’s rear end, not inform users of their rights.”

“I would imagine probably most people do not read the whole thing,” Zuckerberg replied. “But everyone has the opportunity to and consents to it.” Senator Kennedy was unimpressed. “I’m going to suggest you go home and rewrite it,” he replied, “and tell your $1,200 dollar an hour lawyer you want it written in English, not Swahili, so the average American user can understand.”

Since Zuckerberg’s staff are currently so overworked, the Observer is proud to announce that it has drafted a new, human-readable user agreement that honours Zuckerberg’s new commitment to “transparency”. Here it is.

Welcome!

Hi! I’m Mark Zuckerberg and I’m so excited that you want to join our global community. Most corporations are led by faceless executives, but not this one. I founded Facebook and I own the controlling shares, so everything that happens round here is down to me.

1. The first thing you need to know is that Facebook is an idealistic and optimistic company that aims to enfold every human on the planet into its wonderful global community. Our mission is to unite humanity and thereby bring about world peace. To do that, we provide an awesome range of cool online services that ensure you never, ever get bored. And the really neat thing about these services is that they’re completely FREE!

2. Our key principle is that you own your own data – that’s the tech term for the stuff you upload to our platform. All those status updates, photos, videos, likes, messages, pokes, shares etc belong to you and you can download them and store them on your device any time you like.

3. So our philosophy is that if you want your data then you can have it. I know that must seem incredibly generous, but actually your data isn’t worth a corpse’s fart (excuse my French) to you. I mean, how could you sell it? And who would want it anyway?

4. But when you agree to rent us your data, then we can put it to work for you in two ways. First, we use it to provide all those cool free services I mentioned. And second, we add to it all the stuff we know and can infer about you to build a personal profile that ensures that we know more about you than your mother or even your partner (if you’re lucky enough to have one). Did you know, for example, that the profile we construct for you has no fewer than 98 data points? In this way, we add value to your worthless data and turn it into gold dust.

5. By the way – and just for the avoidance of doubt – most of those 98 points are not your data; they’re ours, which is why when you download your data you won’t ever see them.

6. There’s a lot of fake news around claiming that we sell your data to advertisers. We ABSOLUTELY do no such thing and I’m personally hurt by those allegations. What happens is that advertisers come to us who want to reach particular kinds of people. For instance: “Anyone who lives in Philadelphia, studies philosophy in college, is 21, has bought a blue T-shirt in the past 12 months, is neurotic, makes less than $28,000 a year and is likely to buy a minivan in the next six months.” We just search through our profile database, find people who match those criteria and make sure that the advertiser’s message appears in their news feeds. That way, members of our community only see stuff that they will be interested in.

7. You will see reports in the media that Facebook supposedly makes insane amounts of money from doing all this stuff. What these biased reports omit to mention is that it costs a bomb to provide you with all our cool services for free. They also make out that I am insanely wealthy. But that’s just because I happen to own a lot of Facebook shares. And besides, Jessica (my wife) and I don’t really care about money, which is why we’re committed to giving it all away to charity – eventually.

8. But for now, all I care about is that you join our wonderful community and spend at least an hour every day using our awesome services. Hence my new motto: move fast and sign things. So please click here.

Cheers, Mark

What I’m reading

• Like all good geeks, I sometimes read patent applications, especially those lodged by Google and Facebook. Here’s a Facebook one – US20180012146A1 – for “sentiment polarity for users of a social networking system”. It’s about how to infer the sentiments in a web user by viewing a web page. “The sentiment polarity of the user is inferred based on received information about an interaction between the user and the page (eg like, report etc ), and may be based on analysis of a topic extracted from text on the page. The system infers a positive or negative sentiment polarity of the user toward the content of the page, and that sentiment polarity then may be associated with any second or subsequent interaction from the user related to the page content.” This is surveillance capitalism in action.

• A fascinating Wired article on a research study which analyses how Russian Facebook ads divided and targeted users during the 2016 presidential election. Much more detailed than earlier studies.

• The web is just a giant confirmation-bias machine. A Wired video shows how most of us like nothing better than stuff that confirms our own beliefs.