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.
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.
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.
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 ...
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.
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.
The freeness of tv is a relic of the broadcast era when it was impossible to charge for TV usage. People now pay for cable, and people long paid for print. People also pay for iphone apps. I think the freeness of the web is due to an accident/stupidity of the web browser creators in not building an easy, automatic payment system into the web browser itself, thus creating a considerable penny-gap problem.
People don't really pay for print. Generally speaking, the fee that most print publications charge is more about qualifying their readers for advertisers (e.g. people who will pay money to read about X) than anything else.
Not sure who down-voted you, because while I generally disagree, you make a really good point...why the hell haven't browser makers built an integrated payments platform? They're probably better positioned than almost anyone to do so, and it would instantly turn all Safari, Chrome, and IE from weird strategic products into cash machines. And it would free Firefox from relying on the search engines for their revenue.
The majority of cable channels still have tons of advertising; consumers are paying for the channel, but I doubt the subscription fees are the majority of the revenue for the channel.
Regardless, it's a very different issue if your core value proposition is "using this is super useful and awesome because everyone you know is also using it". What would be the optimal pricing model for a TV network that was exponentially more enjoyable the more people were watching it? $0.
Doesn't matter. Even if the cable companies simply exchange your money for one dollar bills and burn them, you're still giving them money. So it stands to reason that if you can get people used to paying for individual online services (like they do for HBO on their cable), then it is not required that things be ad supported anymore.
I think the reason things are ad supported is because making money from advertising is really simply. You need one person at your organization to call an advertiser, and a day of his work can give you millions in instant cash. Customers, on the other hand, require a lot more maintenance and generate less money per individual, so scaling up a business based on customers paying money is very difficult. (Even Microsoft, a huge company that sells software, prefers to get OEMs to buy you a Windows license. One deal with one OEM equals millions of dollars. One deal with you equals $39.)
So it stands to reason that if you can get people used to paying for individual online services (like they do for HBO on their cable), then it is not required that things be ad supported anymore.
Advertising isn't required; lots of services do fine without it, even some free ones that make money through other methods. I'm just saying that in general people seem to prefer paying with their attention to paying with their cash. If you can somehow shift that balance, then yes, advertising could go away. But I don't think that will ever happen, because people just don't value their attention and time like they do their cash. I think it's a side effect of human nature somehow.
Among other things, because cable does a great job of obscuring what they're paying for. Bundles with Internet, phone and/or DVR service, time-limited promotions, ...
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.
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
People don't object because providing Facebook with personal data is voluntary and directly related to the service it provides. Facebook cannot store or display your private photos without having a copy, it cannot let you contact anyone without knowing whom you want to contact, etc.
> 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?
> People don't object because providing Facebook with personal data is voluntary
Yes, it's incompatible, because providing the data to Facebook can be involuntary. The existence of an account (even a shadow) means that your friends can inject data without your approval. A tag in any picture, a mention by name at any kind of event or location, or even the existence of the friend link are all pieces of data that contribute towards profiling your behavior and determining advertisements that you might respond to. This all occurs even if you yourself didn't provide any of it. (Good luck telling your friends to never tag or mention you on Facebook.)
Facebook lets you think that you can delete or undo any of the above, but you still rely solely on Facebook's ethics as to whether they actually cease using the "deleted" data. The only force that can restrict Facebook from keeping and using such data is legislation, and that and its implications would probably be a greater evil.
Most of the volume of data that Facebook collects is just logging the "Like" buttons on other sites. Most people have no idea that info is being collected.
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).
>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.
While I agree with 2, I'm not convinced by 1--where can you get data that is unbiased without FORCING random sets of people to participate in a study in the way you want them to? Even FDA-mandated experiments are biased by the fact that it requires volunteers.
The published social science they have produced so far is unimpressive, though. I attended a talk by a Facebook Data Group employee a little while ago, and it was a bit sad.
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...