
What Facebook Knows - llambda
http://technologyreview.com/featured-story/428150/what-facebook-knows/
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novum
_Private conversations, family photos, and records of road trips, births,
marriages, and deaths all stream into the company's servers and lodge there.
Facebook has collected the most extensive data set ever assembled on human
social behavior. Some of your personal information is probably part of it._

There are some positives that come from this — the article gives the example
of improving organ donor registrations — but they lost my trust long ago. It
feels wrong for any one private entity to have so much data on so many people.
Then again, I'm not sure whether I'd prefer it to be any one government
either.

Is it not the case that having a Facebook account, even a sparsely populated
one, is incompatible with maintaining any semblance of control over your
online identity, PII, privacy? Plus FB creating "shadow profiles" for non-
members[0] would suggest they're tracking me even 18 months after deleting my
account. They've closed the catch-22 loop.

[0] [http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/10/18/1429223/facebook-
is-b...](http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/10/18/1429223/facebook-is-building-
shadow-profiles-of-non-users)

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jboggan
I'm nearly salivating at the thought of writing graph algorithms at that scale
. . . and actually having the outcome mean something and be acted upon in a
timely fashion. It sounds like a dream job to me. That scale and depth of
information is a very powerful tool, no doubt, and it should be wielded for a
good purpose. This article at least encourages me that people are thinking
beyond the bottom line on these issues. Awesome.

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jman1
Agreed on the salivation and the opportunity in terms of a dream job. But to
think that just because the data science team thinks more about social science
than Facebook prOducts the corporation will change its tune and stop being
creepy is naive or myopic at best.

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bokonist
Man, I wish Facebook would just charge $25 a year and then focus on making the
actual user the customer, rather than making the end user the product and
advertisers the customer. If they did that, there would be no more
advertising, no more creepy selling of personal data, no more spamming my feed
with "Susie likes Walmart" messages. On the plus side, if they fail to make
the end user the customer, maybe a business opportunity will open up for
someone to create a social network that isn't evil ...

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ryanwaggoner
No one (or close enough to make no difference) would pay. Seriously, people
may complain about ads but they have almost always proven that they prefer ads
to paying, hence the reason the vast majority of media channels (tv, print,
web, etc) are free with ads, or cheap and ad-subsidized. And not having 80-99%
of people I want to friend (because they dont want to pay) would be death for
a social network.

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Estragon
Now you mention it, it's kind of surprising that they don't offer premium
accounts with no ads and strong privacy guarantees. I might even get back on
facebook if they did that.

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bishnu
The problem with this is the people buying premium accounts are precisely the
people advertisers are trying to target.

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ams6110
_If Facebook were a country ... it would far outstrip any regime past or
present in how intimately it records the lives of its citizens._

Let's hope the government doesn't one day decide to seize it. I wonder if they
(Facebook) have any kind of self-destruct mechanism should that ever come to
pass. No, actually, I don't really wonder, I'm sure they don't.

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pm90
I bet they have layers and layers of redundancy. Remember Digital Fortress? It
will take some time before they can shut down the goddamn thing completely

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jman1
What Facebook knows: too much. What it has: too much squared.

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Evbn
Facebook is giving new meaning to the word "social scientist", and has perhaps
the cleanest data set in the world for doing actual science.

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gipsies
While facebook has access to a vast amount of data, there are also a few
disadvantages of doing research on their dataset:

1\. You only have data of people capable of buying a computer and having
internet access. And then having the time and willingness to use facebook.
This places a bais in the information and obtained research.

2\. The profile of users don't reflect who they truly are. It represent what
they want to be, or at least how they want to be percieved by others.
Admittingly this problem is also present when doing surveys.

It certainly provides a lot more information and would aid social scientist,
but it's not perfect. Then again they passively collect a huge pile of
information too (e.g. using their like buttons all over the internet).

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vph
>2\. The profile of users don't reflect who they truly are. It represent what
they want to be, or at least how they want to be percieved by others.
Admittingly this problem is also present when doing surveys.

Do you realize that you are saying what you think people are?

Which is which? who they really are and what they really want to be. Is Clark
Kent real or Superman real? This is why sociologists have day jobs.

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alex_g
Everything.

