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Comment by wahsd | Hacker News Reader

Um, when people start waking up they will realize that it isn't, hasn't ever, and will never work. Facebook only functions on one core input; your demographic info. I would bet significant amounts of money that Facebook has permanently backed up everyone's demographic info for all eternity. It is the vulnerable point in the Facebook deathstar. No one already looks at or intentionally clicks on any adds on Facebook, imagine how difficult it would be to sell marketers that facebook flavored bull if the user demographics were junk info.

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The thing about permanently backed up demographic info though: it changes. My age, for example, changes every year. My location changes every few years. My interests change. Hell, even gender changes.

All of those things are fairly trivial for FB to track. Age (obvious), Location (trackable through Places, geolocation, etc. through that thing in your pocket), Gender (presumably you would post a status update about something that big?), Employment (status, amassing colleagues as 'friends'?). It seems like they've hit on a constantly self-updating demographic info machine...

I was referring to your mention of "permanently backed up", i.e., stale demographic information, whose value decreases predictably with time. While FB is in business, you're spot on.

Demographic info may not be the only thing they know about. Given a lot of sites embed some sort of Facebook widget on their pages, they have a tracking mechanism.

If I had not explicitly signed-out of Facebook before visiting all these other sites, Facebook knows about it. And maybe also the browsing habits of people in my network. That gives a really deep profile about me - a lot more than just my demographics.

Recently there was an excellent article on ReadWriteWeb, about why Facebook terrifies Google: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/why_facebook_terrifies_...

Check out screen shots of their respective ad platforms in that article: the level of targeting that is possible with Facebook (which is only going to become deeper, given all the additional details they are gathering about me) is simply not possible with Google. This is one major reason why Google is pushing hard with Google+

"If I had not explicitly signed-out of Facebook before visiting all these other sites, Facebook knows about it."

Even if you have explicitly signed-out of Facebook, the presence of the like button on a site allows Facebook to track your movements on that site. Their like button javascript reports back a unique login cookie that is not erased when you sign off of Facebook. Pressing the like button is a small part of its purpose. Its purpose is to track you around the web as long as you have ever logged into Facebook before. This was all covered here on HN months ago, when I first learned of it.

They're worried about search but Facebook hasn't even tried any kind of search yet. Personally I'm not convinced they're as dangerous and plugged in as people think. Everything they've done seems to me to be the most obvious thing every time (e.g. instead of selling info to advertisers they just dump email addresses) and quite lazy.

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