What Facebook Knows | Hacker News Reader

What Facebook Knows

technologyreview.com

21 pointsiProject13 comments

"If Facebook were a country..."

The fact that it has 900 billion people and no real source of revenue or trade would make its citizens among the poorest in the world. The massive infrastructure costs for its regime of information gathering are not offset by any kind of taxes. Further, the lack of any police force or military (aside from a few pushy lawyers) means that it has no way of protecting itself or ever hoping to recover the massive loss that went into building the fledgling nation. But the 2000 bureaucrats running the place are doing pretty well for themselves.

And yet still, I couldn't make this article interesting.

Previous HN Discussion - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4123652

As a PhD student studying ape communication there is nothing more enticing then landing a spot on the Facebook data science team. I bet the best way for a current student to get a job there in the future would be to initiate an academic collaboration while still in the lab.

Good luck getting 900 million people to fill out consent forms to satisfy your IRB. Academic research follows actual ethics rules. :)

Wouldn't the terms of service qualify? It explicitly gives Facebook permission to use your data.

Not for academic purposes they wouldn't, that doesn't really constitute informed consent. Most people don't read ToS and that is well known.

Am I the only one who sees most of my Friends on Facebook filling out junk information. I have two kids, a wife, and no sibling on Facebook, but in reality those are just acquaintances, I have lots of siblings, but no wife, nor kids. Most of the people I interact with on Facebook do something similar. Fake occupations, etc. etc.

We have a very different circle of acquaintances. I only know a few people that have fake information on FB out of a few hundred "friends." The most common I see is just a name change while applying to grad school. I see very few fake relationships, though I did see it more often in high school.

I remember on Myspace I had a lot of friends who were "99 years old". These sites are really about establishing a presence to sell artistic goods. The rest is kinda silly. Who has time to fill out Facebook like some sort of questionnaire? Its not the census, so their is no penalty for inaccurate information.

Am I the only one who thought this was a terrible article? There wasn't much to it. A collection of quotes and a high level explanation that basically facebook collects data (duh) and has a bunch of infrastructure for analysis.

Why learn how people behave when you can teach them how to behave?

Exactly.

When articles like this emerge detailing the trouble of understanding the mountain of data that accumulates from a piece of software it makes me wonder about what their goal was in the design process, or whether they think of it that way at all.

The problem, to me, is not the one detailed in the article: but the fact that a company can have such a crisis. It makes me think that this company has no internal compass and can only invent one through analysis of a data set collected with a muddled original intent.

"Why learn how people behave when you can teach them how to behave?"

Short answer: because that rarely works. Like how it would be nice if we could be living right now in one of those pure, good-in-theory idealistic societies...

We have a few ways of influencing behavior and preferences, but in many ways it's a black box, and it's usually much more productive to ask "how can I profit from helping people do what they want to do?" than "how can I make people do what I want them to do?"

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