Facebook Is Using Your Profile to Track Global Urban Migration Trends | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Is Using Your Profile to Track Global Urban Migration Trends

theatlanticcities.com

31 pointskracalo17 comments

I'm sure the discussion will soon slip to "OMG, Facebook has data and its gonna do evil things". That's a valid point, but I hope people here see the amount of information we now know about _us_, that equips for more informed decisions of tomorrow.

Not so sure. According to Facebook I'm 6 years younger than I am, I live in Monaco and studied rocket science at Harvard. Most of my friends have similar distortions, and when the subject comes up we're surprised when someone tells us their profile uses real data.

I know that my experience is hardly indicative of anything, but I'd like to believe that it's happening more and more.

Really? Apart from the odd few who use "Full time mummy" as their job description, everyone I know uses real information.

My quick-login-purpose Facebook account says I live on the dark side of the moon. I wonder if they will notify SpaceX.

These are things your Facebook profile says about you, but based on your IP address, interactions with other people, presence in photos, how you describe events, applications you visit with Facebook credentials, language you use, etc. Facebook probably knows (or could know) a lot of real things about you.

I'd estimate over 90% of my friends show accurate information. Some don't fill it all out and a few use fake jobs or a silly middle name. Most of the fake information I see is left over from when people were younger and put up 'funny' stuff in the job field as they didn't have one then.

Google's Moto G seems a lot more interesting now -- their marketing effort has been summarized as "getting the next 1 billion people online."

This alludes to anticipating urban migration and knowing 1) who moves where 2) when they move. This can be very interesting and (in most cases) frighteningly accurate advertisement information.

The Moto G is a great effort and I applaud them for it (and my Moto X is the best Android I've ever had), but the real next billion don't come from a phone that still costs $179 or so. It will come significantly cheaper smart or smart-enough-for-facebook devices. Think the even cheaper Chinese OEM Androids, think the Nokia Asha devices.

Tracking urban migration trends?

The temptation that none of the big data hoover companies (Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Yahoo, etc.) will be able to resist is something else:

When you have so much data on everybody, you have created yourself a situation that allows you to "hack the system" to your advantage and the disadvantage of those who don't have all that data. You can analyze the trends that the data shows and link them to the movements of the stock exchange, and you're all set for infinite passive income and domination - now you know before everybody else what to buy and what to sell and when (you can call it "insider trading based on data").

Now, if you, as the user want to supply all that data, that's up to you. If so, you'll not only be appreciated by those companies but by certain government agencies as well.

My team and I did an analysis on our Facebook dataset recently that might (or might not) have inspired this particular work.

You can find the geographic analysis within this blog post:

http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2013/04/data-science-of-the-f...

There is a much higher resolution version of the "migration wheel" available here:

http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2013/12/start/facebo...

From that data? It's way too basic.

Mine isn't completed, partly because the real friends know it and the casual acquaintances don't need it, but if it were? Well, I can't tell them where I'm from with any precision. I grew up in four different towns, none particularly close to the others, went back to one for University (well, sort of - a stint in each of two towns in a conurbation), moved to a fifth for work, currently live in a sixth but will probably move to a seventh later this year - and I don't expect that move to be a 'forever' home.

So, Facebook, where am I from?

Do you think that your situation is typical? I don't think so

No (though I'd suggest less atypical than you might think), but that's the point.

If you're looking to model migration patterns and you have a data gathering system that biases your data to capture a bimodal migration pattern - childhood in one location, adulthood in another - then I might suggest that you'll disproportionately find the data you were apparently expecting which fits that pattern.

It's a very rough sample with considerable selection bias, of course. But it's the kind of data that's (essentially) never reported in a centralized way and on a global scale, otherwise.

I really wish this was interactive. I clicked through to the article directly from Facebook, but it was still static images. It's hard to follow the lines when there are a bunch of them overlapping.

Does that give them enough of an edge to make a killing in the property market? (by investing in up-and-coming areas before everyone else catches on)

And their users are giving them their data for free, in exchange for being able to get a daily does of "Like"-events, so that we can feel validated I guess?

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