When You Fall in Love, This Is What Facebook Sees (2014)
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
When I show these posts to people who resemble the average internet user, they just don't care. This is something that is saddening and baffling for me. I think it's just that most people don't understand why this is an issue to begin with and people need to be made aware of what is going on. The easiest way to start would be to discuss privacy issues with your closest family and friends.
Worth mentioning RMS' blog post: https://stallman.org/facebook.html
I kind of work in this field, and it's easy to know a lot more about a stranger than they know about themselves. Given the law of large numbers, I can make lots of accurate predictions of a person's future behavior, and I'm not amazingly smart. I'm also careful to not spy on people because that's just creepy. But, I'm certain that there are people out there using similar types of data who are 1) way smarter than me, 2) creepy, and 3) devious.
(BTW, the data that I use has all PII removed, but it's trivial to identify individuals, if one is motivated)
It is really easy to identify a majority of users of such a dataset.
Everyone in the village would have had detailed spending habits, knowledge of every website browsed, media preferences, political views, porn habits, location history and more all backed up in giant databases that are easily search-able?
Websites Browsed/Media Prefs/Porn Habits: No, these things didnt exist for most of human history. I guess "Media Preferences" would be known if we're talking books vs. newspaper.
Political views: Yes, assuming the person isn't a hermit.
Location History: Yes, presumably you'd know where village-mates are/have been.
Backed up in a database that's easily searchable? I guess that depends on how good your brain is at remembering things.
Not trying to nitpick too hard, but all your viable examples listed are in fact things your fellow villagers would know about you in a close-knit community.
Yeah, you might have a rough idea of spending habits for a handful of people, but not everyone, and not to the same detail.
Books/newspapers/etc sure, you'd know some of it, but you wouldn't have a record of what they consumed in their home unless they told you.
You might know some of their political views, but only the ones they share openly.
If a co-villager wandered off for a week, you wouldn't likely have any idea where they went. You'd have to rely on what they told you, and where others said they went, which isn't necessarily accurate. Additionally, you wouldn't get the level of detail FB can.
No brain is capable of storing even half of the location that FB's DB can. I don't care how good someone's memory is.
They would know some of the above sure, but it'd be at a high level, and not nearly as accurate.
"Yeah, you might have a rough idea of spending habits for a handful of people, but not everyone, and not to the same detail."
The shopkeeper does. And as someone who grew up in a small town, the gossip is real.
"ou might know some of their political views, but only the ones they share openly"
Facebook doesnt know my political views? Though I dont openly share them on fb. More to avoid flamewars.
"If a co-villager wandered off for a week, you wouldn't likely have any idea where they went"
Depends how well you know them. You might know they like that spot by the lake for example. And if I leave my phone at home, no one would know where I went.(which sounds like a good reason to carry my phone, safety)
People who care more about what the neighbours think, might consider the village having access to all their behaviour a bigger problem than some distant, faceless corporation.
For people who care about power imbalance, a single corporation knowing everything about everybody is much more serious than people in villages knowing about their neighbours.
* IMHO the political climate we live in could easily produce another Stasi within a generation.
* If that we get something like that again they'll have a decade or more information on you, and information you are leaking right now could be used to coerce, blackmail and threaten you.
[& p.s. your anonymity and privacy shot up as soon as you stepped away from your village.]
It's almost as if social norms have changed since the days of tight knit hunter-gathering, wicker shanty peoples roamed the Earth.
Shocking.
In a country where having the "wrong bumper sticker" gets people driven off the road, or riding my bicycle nearly sees me pushed into parked cars by folks driving lifted Dodge Rams, your ideas make little sense.
The difference is that in the village case, the information distribution was much more symmetric. People knew about you and you knew about them, and you knew about each other's knowledge and presumably acted accordingly. So for instance, if being gay was going to be a problem in your village, you hid it well.
With Facebook, they have all the information about you, and you don't even know what they know about you. So in the best case scenario, you are hoping that they are going to be a "benevolent dictator" with their asymmetric knowledge, and not exploit you.
As far as facebook, I don't use their apps and when accessing through a browser don't let the browser share my location. I may have to consider accessing FB through an anonymous vpn service at some point...
What about people that had no choice?
For example when a parent post a picture of their newborn baby and continues over the years, for example pictures of their sports events and training, movies of choir presentations and whatnot until the child is savy enough to use Facebook themselves. Don't those people deserve privacy too?
What about significant others that maybe don't even have an account, but have their counterpart share their shared stories and media?
Of course, not 100% of the blame lies directly with Facebook since they're not actively holding guns to people's heads forcing them to use the service, but I see it as more akin to predatory lending where the business profits by exploiting their customers.
Similarly facebook could abuse our information, but they stand to lose a lot if they do. Either way, this is the future and there really isn't much we can do about it. Businesses are going to track us, and save going off grid and living in the woods, I don't think there's any real escape.
Banks have foreclosed on wrong houses etc, and didn't suffer (enough) for it from either the hand of the law or the hands of customers, so they don't care (enough) to make sure they're doing it properly.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortgage_Electronic_Registrati...
There was a talk at 33c3 about just that(Build your own NSA).
Each of the data points is an average of many users (and potentially have huge errorbars they do not show). Therefore for single individuals, this result may not be very predictive.
In fact, given that the distribution of number of posts likely follows power law, the average is hugely influenced by a small number of heavy facebook users. I would say this figure summaries more about top facebook users rather than the majority of users. So when "you" (an average facebook user) fall in love, this is probably not what facebook sees.
FWIW, I think people are often too quick to dismiss graphs as misleading due to the y-scale and I do think the graph is interesting. That said, I think a lot depends on the context, and being directly below "When You [emphasis added] Fall in Love, This Is What Facebook Sees" makes this seem misleading.
Seems like a strange choice; most dating couples I know don't seem to set an anniversary date.
"Relationships start with a period of courtship: on Facebook, messages are exchanged, profiles are visited, posts are shared on each other's timelines."
They didn't produce any graphs of the amount of messages exchanged though.
[1] https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-data-science/the-for...
Any saved derived information, like what kind of person they think you are, or what they think you'd be likely to buy, must also be shared.
Basically a dump of all their databases under your user ID.
All this is showing is that prior to being in a relationship there is a lot of online activity between two people, and less after being in a relationship. Presumably because prior to being in a relationship, you are spending more time communicating at a distance, and when in a relationship you tend to spend more of your time physically together rather than communicating online.
This data says nothing about how much these people are using the website in general.
small scale Y axis make it look quite large, but that doesn't seem a seismic shift.
I do think that relationships these days are more fleeting than they used to be. I think that Facebook (Instagram, particularly) tends to encourage this type of behaviour.
Constantly being exposed to other couples' luxurious lifestyles and holiday trips is not particularly good for relationships (particularly new relationships).
I do think that most people these days tend to value earning potential and physical appearance far more than personality when it comes to finding a match and I think that social media is probably responsible for much of this.
Not really. Married couples (particularly those with a baby) are incredibly valuable advertising targets.
> I do think that most people these days tend to value earning potential and physical appearance far more than personality
There is absolutely nothing new about this.
Not new, but it's getting worse.
Who are you to tell me what value system I should have? All of this is independent of social media, by the way.