
41% of Facebook Users Total IDiots - solipsist
http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20070814/facebook-privacy/
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makecheck
"Randomly selected"...did they really have an equal chance of landing any of
the 300 million users on Facebook? How did they find a complete list of users
to select from randomly? (For example, I can bet they excluded anyone who
didn't speak English.)

To survey 1% of Facebook users these days, you need to contact 3 million
people. A sample of 200 could easily be completely inaccurate, and I can say
with absolute certainty that it does not justify a headline like "41% of
Facebook Users". They can't even know it's 0.01%.

They should at least publish some other aggregate info. For example...once
"randomly" selecting 200 people, did they find that half of them lived in the
same country, or 3/4, or 90%? Did these people have anything else in common
besides a tendency to share personal information? Couldn't the experiment be
easily repeated 2 or 3 times to see if the distribution holds? (That wouldn't
help much given the sample size, but it would show a lot more than they have
now.)

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minalecs
headline is a little sensationalist, but I would hardly call them idiots. Just
some people don't place a priority on personal information. Are the real
idiots the ones providing the information, or the company that allows peoples
personal information to viewed publicly.

