
What Facebook Knows - iProject
http://www.technologyreview.com/featured-story/428150/what-facebook-knows/?mod=related
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calciphus
"If Facebook were a country..."

The fact that it has 900 billion people and no real source of revenue or trade
would make its citizens among the poorest in the world. The massive
infrastructure costs for its regime of information gathering are not offset by
any kind of taxes. Further, the lack of any police force or military (aside
from a few pushy lawyers) means that it has no way of protecting itself or
ever hoping to recover the massive loss that went into building the fledgling
nation. But the 2000 bureaucrats running the place are doing pretty well for
themselves.

And yet still, I couldn't make this article interesting.

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raju
Previous HN Discussion - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4123652>

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grest
As a PhD student studying ape communication there is nothing more enticing
then landing a spot on the Facebook data science team. I bet the best way for
a current student to get a job there in the future would be to initiate an
academic collaboration while still in the lab.

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fl3tch
Good luck getting 900 million people to fill out consent forms to satisfy your
IRB. Academic research follows actual ethics rules. :)

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cluda01
Wouldn't the terms of service qualify? It explicitly gives Facebook permission
to use your data.

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slurgfest
Not for academic purposes they wouldn't, that doesn't really constitute
informed consent. Most people don't read ToS and that is well known.

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endlessvoid94
Am I the only one who thought this was a terrible article? There wasn't much
to it. A collection of quotes and a high level explanation that basically
facebook collects data (duh) and has a bunch of infrastructure for analysis.

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coupdetat
Why learn how people behave when you can teach them how to behave?

~~~
state
Exactly.

When articles like this emerge detailing the trouble of understanding the
mountain of data that accumulates from a piece of software it makes me wonder
about what their goal was in the design process, or whether they think of it
that way at all.

The problem, to me, is not the one detailed in the article: but the fact that
a company can have such a crisis. It makes me think that this company has no
internal compass and can only invent one through analysis of a data set
collected with a muddled original intent.

