

The Implications of Facebook Indexing a Trillion Posts - testrun
http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/28/mining-the-hive-mind/

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lumberjack
I wonder what Stallman might be thinking. He has been against Facebook since
inception and in those days the main concern was not the state but private
entities getting too much power over the consumers/users. I still think that
this should be the main worry for the average Joe.

[https://stallman.org/facebook.html](https://stallman.org/facebook.html)

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adventured
Serious question - what's the fear in terms of what Facebook can or will do
with that? That is, what can they do that would qualify what they have as
power over someone?

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zxcdw
Depends entirely on what they (and people related to them) have shared with
Facebook directly and indirectly, and what Facebook actually _can_ infer from
the information.

Apart from that I have no answer. However, I find it important to realize the
question shouldn't be about what Facebook/whateverelse can "do" _now_ , but
what _will "they" be able to "do" in the future_.

Imagine if there was some Superior Entity which knew _everything_ about every
single person born after some year X. What could that Superior Entity do? What
could it entail if the knowledge of this Superior Entity got leaked to _some_
hands? I mean, everything about politicians, press, authorities, laymen,
teachers, children... Everything.

What are the _actual practical_ worst-case implications of total ubiquitous
surveillance for an individual? For society? This certainly depends on the
society. Implications are certainly different for people living in, say Iran,
Sweden, USA, Canada, Brazil, Russia, China, Germany, North Korea ... For
example in some countries religious matters, although very personal, can be
very serious. Go being an open atheist in say Indonesia.

I really have no clue, but everything seems like a huge mess with
surveillance.

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hnnewguy
> _However, I find it important to realize the question shouldn 't be about
> what Facebook/whateverelse can "do" now, but what will "they" be able to
> "do" in the future._

Exactly. It's not about Facebook or the authorities mining data for criminal
activity. The problem occurs once the authorities have you in their sights,
for whatever reason. With reams of private data available and no context, they
can (and will) use it to paint any picture of you they need to.

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jrochkind1
> _Most obviously, the News Feed could learn to mimic our external dialogue,
> showing us posts with similar content to what we spread. Never talk about
> sports or babies? Facebook could eventually filter those out of your feed.
> Just shared your thoughts on Syria, celebrity gossip, or the police state?
> The algorithm could pull an audible and show you more about related news._

I was pretty sure Facebook was already doing this, even before the public
search. No?

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pc86
Anecdotal of course, but I have a Facebook friend from political circles, and
I see posts from him every day about the Dallas Cowboys. I ignore those and
typically like or comment on political posts, but I still see Cowboys all the
time.

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drewcrawford
I'm pretty interested in how this is implemented, actually. Naively you could
search a global index and then filter results down to your friends, but that
filter seems impossibly slow. Alternatively you could maintain a separate
index per person, but querying 500 indexes seems unreasonable.

Maybe they partition the graph into cliques which they index, search and then
fix up with a second pass to add and remove noncliqued friends?

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yincrash
You could build an index per person, but rather than search 500 indexes, the
index of each person would be of all their and their friends' posts, so you
would only search one index.

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arethuza
Doesn't that make updating rather expensive - for each new post it needs to go
into a lot of different search indexes?

Off-topic: Wasn't there a start-up a while back that was allowing people to
build their own personal search index for their social media content?

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ihsw
Sounds about right, but the benefit is that reading through every single
person's personal index would be very fast. This can be useful in many ways,
and it alone was probably the goal.

In fact it was probably already developed long before this feature was
deployed to the general populace, and this new feature is just a token gesture
of "giving back to users."

I doubt it'll see much use from end-users themselves.

Yes the search terms from users will be useful, but I don't see this as being
a replacement for Google.

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AznHisoka
Wouldn't this be a lot more useful if we could search ALL public posts by any
person or business (FB pages)? Sort of like Twitter search. There'd be no
privacy issue b/c u'd only be searching the public posts.

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getdavidhiggins
The "Deactivate your account" button is still the only privacy setting you
need to click. The implications are only for facebook - now they have more
rope to play with - and something else to maintain - this does nothing for
users, who expressly waive their right to privacy from the outset in setting
up an account.

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jambo
Deactivating is designed to leave your account intact in case you change your
mind. In fact, some people use this as a super-logout, deactivating their
account when not using it. If you want to truly delete your account, the best
way to express that intention is the harder to find button to delete your
account.

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getdavidhiggins
Doesn't an inactive account expire after a certain time, and there is a 'grace
period' to log back in before that time and keep the account?

On a side note: accounts are persistent through time, and it's not hard to
match multiple old deleted copies (resignups) and create a 'super-account'

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Dirlewanger
So there's this for end users, are there any business-specific tools for
marketers that Facebook has available or is planning to make now?

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pearjuice
And all of this is brought to you by the friendly folks of PHP. Next time when
you bash PHP because the argument order for functions is inconsistent, think
about how some people overlook semantics and build great things with the tools
they have at their disposal.

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algorithmsRcool
I would be willing to wager the shoes on my feet that this indexing system is
not written in PHP.

