What Facebook Knows | Hacker News Reader

What Facebook Knows

technologyreview.com

67 pointsllambda28 comments

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.

[0] http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/10/18/1429223/facebook-is-b...

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.

Selling both of those benefits draws a lot of attention to the fact that Facebook is making money from selling your attention and your data.

The problem with this is the people buying premium accounts are precisely the people advertisers are trying to target.

Why do most people pay for cable when the free channels provide more than enough content to occupy their time?

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, ...

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.

See: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/magazine/16Journalism-t.ht...

"Advertising always accounted for the vast majority of the publishers’ revenues — with newspapers, 80 percent was the rule of thumb"

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.

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

What Facebook knows: too much. What it has: too much squared.

Facebook is giving new meaning to the word "social scientist", and has perhaps the cleanest data set in the world for doing actual science.

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.

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).

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.

>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.

Everything.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com