Salesforce is teaming up with Facebook to let customers leverage their employees' Facebook friends. That will help companies find better employees and, not unexpectedly, upsell to their employees friends and friends of customers.

Salesforce users who build applications on Facebook will get immediate access to the social networking site's 120 million users worldwide, and be able to leverage Facebook users' links.

Upon learning that news, I discovered my vocabulary contained words I didn't even imagine I knew.

Look at it this way: You spend a lifetime building up friends, with both parties seeing each other through bad times and enjoying the good times, sharing confidences and all the other good things friendship brings.

You get them to join you on Facebook, and make new friends there.

Then you find out that companies are leveraging your Facebook friends without your say-so. How does that make you feel?

With all the effort one puts into making friends, I suggest we treat them as intellectual property, and treat violations of that relationship as severely as one would treat violations of IP rights.

It's one thing to recommend a friend for a job when your employer asks you for a recommendation; it's quite another for your employer to glom onto your Facebook friends without your say-so and pitch them. Who says your friends will welcome the pitch? Who says you won't get bad feedback?

What about privacy? Well, no less an authority than Vint Cerf, one of the driving forces behind the Internet, has said words to the effect that the age of privacy is over and we should get over it. I respectfully beg to disagree. He may be an authority on computing and the Internet but that doesn't make him an authority on ethics or privacy issues.

Me, I wanted to call the Law & Order: SVU team on hearing about the rationale for Salesforce's teaming up with Facebook. Still do, as a matter of fact.

When social networking applications first emerged, they were seen as a way for people to connect more easily with others. Love, fellowship and general goodness were supposed to follow. And they did, to some extent, as we ran around friending others.

Now, though, with corporations getting their tentacles into social networking sites, the concept of global friending is going south mighty fast. Corporations are trying to leverage customers' social networks in order to sell more.

All that's going to be small potatoes pretty soon, I realized, as I sat listening to Salesforce.com CEO and chairman Marc Benioff at Dreamforce 2008, the Salesforce.com annual user event, today. The company's tying up with Facebook, and that will let companies "build a new class of business applications that leverage the social graph," he said.

Think of being able to collaborate on Facebook to build a project with your friends, Marc continued. Yep, think about it, especially with Facebook COO Cheryl Sandberg gushing on the one hand that her site has "taken the power of real trust, real user privacy controls, and made it possible for people to be their authentic selves online," then saying on the other that businesses using Facebook want to use the site's power to engage in a deeper way with constituents.

And how will they engage in a deeper way with said constituents? Well, children, by leveraging users' social networks, that's how. Here's what Marc said about building Salesforce.com apps and running them on Facebook: "You have immediate access to 120 million users (that's how many Facebook has now), and you can use Facebook Connect to link into any Web site in the world and let users use the power of their Facebook friends."

I feel empowered already! Let me say now, unequivocally, that anyone who tries to send me a sales message because s/he is my friend on a social networking site, will rapidly be unfriended. Friends don't try to sell friends life insurance, or used cars, or cleaning cloths; business acquaintances do.