Wolfram Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook

blog.wolframalpha.com

37 points·cleverjake··12 comments

Cool idea, but the first two comments on SW's blog post are about privacy and data usage. I admit I have some concerns as well.

What's Wolfram's policy about personal data usage? (And is it better or worse than Facebook?)

From the link provided below the analysis tool (http://www.wolframalpha.com/facebook/):

Come back again! Fresh data = new results every time!

Your information is only stored for one hour, so each time you return, we'll run fresh analytics on your Facebook data.

Cool, thanks!

http://www.wolframalpha.com/privacypolicy.html

While they say they do not sell, rent, or lease your information to third parties they do not say they delete it. So if you let them get your facebook data, they will have and keep it.

No-go for me. This is a perfect example of why I prefer applications that run "locally" on my computer. There seems to be nothing in this report that would not be possible to do with a combination of open-source solutions.

Perhaps they are looking to legally replicate some fraction of Facebook's corpus of user data.

Wolfram (the person, and by extension the company) really seems to have gotten very interested in personal metrics in the last few years.

Can anyone actually get into this? It keeps dying when I try to 'get started'

You're not alone – I can't even get their "sign in" page to load.

2 hours later +1

This is absolutely amazing!

It's a bit scary as well!

scary to know how much info facebook has about you. wait until they actually start selling all of our little secrets

I really want to like Wolfram Alpha. But I can't. It's too slow.

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