When you really get down to it, high school is about relationships with the opposite sex, both intimate and friendly.
Not quite true for everybody.
The truth is that the plethora of information Facebook knows about you is unfathomable.
That's the crux of the matter right there — nobody normal realizes every click, every website visit, every posted word, every posted picture, every mobile refresh, and every contact in your auto-stolen address book betrays you.
For most people, the betrayal doesn't matter. The local barista/actor doesn't want to understand thousand-dimensional data analyses and what that portends for their future. Mainly, because it doesn't matter for them. Who does it matter for though? Future important people? Assembling massive future corporate blackmail material? Thoughtcrime? Crime by association? Or does none of this matter at all and it's just people bitching about bad dinners, good vacations, and showing unlimited baby pictures?
There's nothing new to be said to us about the evil of Facebook/Google, but normals have no idea how deep the rabbit hole goes.
I think this point rings especially true, especially in the light of recent events at PyCon. Social media has vast power to build or ruin reputations, and having all your private information on facebook can give you a larger surface area to attack.
This has always interested me (well, maybe not always--I'm not that cutting edge :p).
I used to have Facebook but deleted it, because I didn't like the whole concept of people using your online persona against you. Yes, my profile is still in Facebook's database but at least it is no longer immediately searchable/accessible.
And what I'm getting at is I have some friends with anarchist tendencies. Two of them are computer scientists and they had/have no problems voicing their anarchist thoughts on Facebook.
The other person was in the (German) languages field and she would never talk about it nor post anything related to it on her Facebook.
I still don't know where I stand because I travel to and from the US a lot, and feel if they associate me with anarchist stuff this may complicate matters when trying to cross the boarder.
For example, I was going to post a photoquote (I just made that up) with Thoreau and the statement "If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law."
But I decided not to. Hurrah for self-censorship, brought to you by the gov't.
>but normals have no idea how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Normals? Really? Yeesh.
Anyways "normals" care no more about how facebook works or what it does than they do about how Intel's chips work, Ford's engines, or NASA's Mars rover. How it works simply doesn't matter. There's no rabbit hole.
> These machines will know more about you than you do. These machines will decide what you eat, the kinds of clothes you buy, the books you read, the television shows you watch, and the kind of person you are.
While I very much applaud your interest in data analysis, this is very much an overreach. Even assuming that facebook has as much information about you as you think, there has been no service which is better at predicting what you like than you yourself. Furthermore, I have yet to come across a music discovery service which can predict music that I like when I specifically give it songs that I like.
Furthermore, I would like to point out that facebook only knows as much about you as you tell it. I dont use foursqare, checkins, status updates, instagram, photo uploads, etc; not because of some ideology for privacy, but rather because I simply dont find them useful. I know that I am not the only one like that. Facebook has relatively little information about me. I also do not stay logged in to facebook so the link tracking is also nearly useless.
> While I very much applaud your interest in data analysis, this is very much an overreach. Even assuming that facebook has as much information about you as you think, there has been no service which is better at predicting what you like than you yourself.
As additional evidence that you are right, open facebook and look at the ads they are displaying, they are way, way, way off. (currently I am seeing a thermacare ad, I'm not sick, and a car insurance ad, I don't own a car.
Amazon on the other hand pretty much got me to buy a Romba by continuously posting photos of it on all kinds of websites until I just couldn't stand sweeping anymore.
> I also do not stay logged in to facebook so the link tracking is also
> nearly useless.
Facebook already got caught leaving trackable info behind even after logout; they still do some tracking. I personally do not believe Facebook will always continue to voluntarily not track me just because I logged out.
> They want to retain the ability to track browsers after
> logout for safety and spam purposes, and they want to
> be able to log page requests for performance reasons etc.
I wonder if facebook archives any of this information? In the past I was very active on facebook interacting with my friends during college. However I have now graduated and slowly began deleting myself from facebook because I no longer have a use for it (and I worry about jobs). If I completely delete my profile, i wonder if they still have my information
User accounts that are deleted have all associated user created content and data hard deleted after account is deleted. Additionally, a user deletes content (status updates, comments, etc..) that data is hard deleted.
"I had a list of 10 young women who went to my high school, their birthdays, profile photos, class schedules, the television shows they watch, the people they've dated, the parties they went to, where they eat on which days, and even a handful of mobile and home phone numbers. Did I purposefully cause chance meetings with people at my high school? I did. Did I go on dates with a number of those people? I did. Do they, to this day, have any idea how we came to meet each other? Not in the slightest."
What's creepy? That he described what he did or that it's possible to do now (quite easily, in fact). Your comment implies the former but I find the latter more interesting.
Do you really think this the only guy or girl who's tried this?
It's always been possible to stalk people and gather lots of information about them in order to increase ones chances of striking up a romantic relationship with them. it's always been possible to do this with many people at once.
It's always been creepy.
"Do you really think this the only guy or girl who's tried this?"
How did you get that? He didn't say anything like that. He pointed out that this is creepy. Just because people have been creepy for as long as there have been people doesn't change that.
>> Facebook isn't a novelty anymore, it has become something much worse. It has become a necessity.
-- Well, not really. I don't have an account open with them and never have.
Since I'm out of the loop entirely, what have people really gained from using Facebook? The only thing I've heard was reconnecting with old friends (why would I want that?) and mindless browsing. I guess the other thing is that people prefer to use their chat service instead of using text on their phone.
I've of course seen Facebook pages and I've seen some truly amazing social media marketing campaigns on it that are worth studying, but for the life of me, I can't figure out what the appeal is for a person, thus I don't get the quote about it being a necessity. I don't want people holding data about me and I don't want people stalking me. I don't want to have a bunch of "friends" I never met and I don't want to live a life where I "deleted 200 friends." That's nuts and downright frightening.
Stories. So you think about all the people you've known, the interactions you had, and some folks naturally wonder "I wonder what ever happened to ..." Its even a cliche in movies where during the final credits little pop-ups appear over the characters and say something funny about what they ended up doing after the events of the movie took place. So if you happen to run into someone from the "old days" there is often a period of "catching up."
Facebook scratches that itch in spades. Sometimes in a quite creepy way. But it is insanely entertaining to lots and lots and lots of people.
I probably met 2 to 3 thousand people in my life and I honestly couldn't remember their names. Part of the magic of life is remembering those experiences, moving forward, and creating more experiences for you to live. Knowing that I crossed paths with interesting people is enough for me. If I really wanted to keep in contact with all the people I knew, I would have kept up. A simple email would suffice in most cases.
The fact is that we all change and we all grow apart at some point. Your statement makes me wonder how easy it is to slide into that unhealthy territory where you live in your past, and that is my philosophical issue with it.
So what if I missed out on a high school crush? Chances are she is married and has a kid by now. The real chance is that I see her now and realize she is not that pretty, not that smart, or has the same exact personality that I remember, but now it grates into me. There are other people and experiences hanging around the corner that are more than happy to see the future with me, no matter how brief.
I couldn't care less what my friends in HS had for lunch at the nightclub last night. I could take great photos and make it look like I live in paradise.
Anyway, the point I took issue with is the idea that Facebook is a necessity, and your statement does not prove the case in point at all. Why is it a necessity to look back and wonder? Why is it a need to connect with a large group of strangers? Why is it a need to see what someone you haven't seen for 15 years does for a living? Fine, check because you are curious, but once you check 5 times, you are inching closer to the line of obsession and refusal to let go.
This is exactly what I was wondering the other day if it was possible, you nailed it on the head, major props. Basically nobody in high school is on match.com or other dating sites because it's not legal and kids just don't seem to do it. So this is a fantastic algorithmic way to optimize who you should be talking to. A huge factor in finding a good person to date is familiarity and their closeness to you. If they see you all the time and you send out trustworthy, non-socially awkward signals, they are likely to trust you more.
Haha very true, I was going to continue on with that comment and explain more. But then I went back and actually read the end of the article and realized it was about how creepy Facebook is and not really about finding a better date through Facebook. So I was going to either delete the comment or just leave it as is and see if anyone understood it, so it's funny in that way.
> With another minute of manual curation I had a list of 10 young women who went to my high school, their birthdays, profile photos, class schedules, the television shows they watch, the people they've dated, the parties they went to, where they eat on which days, and even a handful of mobile and home phone numbers.
It's creepy that it's so easy to grab that much information about someone.
> ... around a couple of corners, past a drinking fountain that nobody uses ...
Off topic, but now that you mention it, I don't think I've seen a single drinking fountain anywhere on campus in the year I've been working here. An odd observation, but the prevalence of microkitchens with tons of options (including filtered water dispensers) kind of negates the need for fountains everywhere.
The information they have is getting rather noisy though. People are liking and sharing all kinds of random stuff nowadays. Wonder if they can mitigate for this.
Your design layout and grammar and personality give me violent impulses. Just thought you should know since that kind of data isn't available through FB's APIs.
Not quite true for everybody.
The truth is that the plethora of information Facebook knows about you is unfathomable.
That's the crux of the matter right there — nobody normal realizes every click, every website visit, every posted word, every posted picture, every mobile refresh, and every contact in your auto-stolen address book betrays you.
For most people, the betrayal doesn't matter. The local barista/actor doesn't want to understand thousand-dimensional data analyses and what that portends for their future. Mainly, because it doesn't matter for them. Who does it matter for though? Future important people? Assembling massive future corporate blackmail material? Thoughtcrime? Crime by association? Or does none of this matter at all and it's just people bitching about bad dinners, good vacations, and showing unlimited baby pictures?
There's nothing new to be said to us about the evil of Facebook/Google, but normals have no idea how deep the rabbit hole goes.