Ever wondered where the new user growth on Facebook is coming from? Today, the German data protection agency launched legal proceedings against Facebook for illegally accessing and saving personal data of people who don’t use the social networking site.

Facebook is doing this to increase the number of “real people” on the site so that it can report user growth. Facebook claims that the site will reach 1 billion users sometime next year.

Exaggerating the number of users on social networks is nothing new. In fact it is one of the oldest trick in the internet playbook. It sounds and looks good. The end goal is to get it to a climax so that it can be sold and VCs can cash out and move on to the next thing.

But lately, people in the know are whispering that, two thirds of those ‘users’ are individuals with multiple accounts for Mafia Wars, FarmVille, etc. They say in five years nobody will use “Failbook” and that it will go the way of Friendster.

I asked, “If so many users are fake then how come comScore reports that there were “500 million or so” visits to Facebook last month?”

Apparently the “visits” don’t mean visits by real people it is the total number of visits by bots and real people.