Facebook's Future Plans for Data Collection Beyond All Imagination

[wilsonbooks]

On November 12 Facebook, Inc. filed its 178th patent application for a consumer profiling technique the company calls “inferring household income for users of a social networking system.”

“The amount of information gathered from users,” explain Facebook programmers Justin Voskuhl and Ramesh Vyaghrapuri in their patent application, “is staggering — information describing recent moves to a new city, graduations, births, engagements, marriages, and the like.” Facebook and other so-called tech companies have been warehousing all of this information since their respective inceptions. In Facebook’s case, its data vault includes information posted as early as 2004, when the site first went live. Now in a single month the amount of information forever recorded by Facebook —dinner plans, vacation destinations, emotional states, sexual activity, political views, etc.— far surpasses what was recorded during the company’s first several years of operation. And while no one outside of the company knows for certain, it is believed that Facebook has amassed one of the widest and deepest databases in history. Facebook has over 1,189,000,000 “monthly active users” around the world as of October 2013, providing considerable width of data. And Facebook has stored away trillions and trillions of missives and images, and logged other data about the lives of this billion plus statistical sample of humanity. Adjusting for bogus or duplicate accounts it all adds up to about 1/7th of humanity from which some kind of data has been recorded.

According to Facebook’s programmers like Voskuhl and Vyaghrapuri, of all the clever uses they have already applied this pile of data toward, Facebook has so far “lacked tools to synthesize this information about users for targeting advertisements based on their perceived income.” Now they have such a tool thanks to the retention and analysis of variable the company’s positivist specialists believe are correlated with income levels.

They’ll have many more tools within the next year to run similar predictions. Indeed, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Twitter, and the hundreds of smaller tech lesser-known tech firms that now control the main portals of social, economic, and political life on the web (which is now to say everywhere as all economic and much social activity is made cyber) are only getting started. The Big Data analytics revolutions has barely begun, and these firms are just beginning to tinker with rational-instrumental methods of predicting and manipulating human behavior.

More at link

http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/how-facebooks-applications-patents-give-away-its-designs-profiting-our-behavior?page=0%2C0&akid=11236.271206.Fq4o45&rd=1&src=newsletter932511&t=6&paging=off&current_page=1#bookmark

[blkmusclmachine]

1. What's "Facebook"?

[ConcernedCanuk]

2. NSA's dream . . . .

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CC

[Stuart G]

3. k & r thanks for posting..... nt

[transient]

4. The days of myspace seem happily quaint in comparison.

[klook]

5. Is there a mass uprising of Facebook users to fight this?

I'm not a FB user, so I have no idea. Most FB regulars I know shrug off privacy & security concerns, so I wonder what it will take to get them riled up.

[wilsonbooks]

6. Most Facebook users are concerned

about sports and tv shows and family pictures. Politics, not so much.

[FrodosPet]

7. The harder you try to hide from the government, the more they want to watch you

I am such a milquetoast, I cannot imagine the NSA having any serious "look at him"s on me.

Then again, I post on DU, so yeah, I am sure there are records on me, as well as you and everyone else here.

[wilsonbooks]

8. No surprize

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/12/10/nsa-uses-google-cookies-to-pinpoint-targets-for-hacking/?wpisrc=al_comboNE&clsrd

[jsr]

9. It's 1984 Beyond All Imagination.

[davidpdx]

10. Interesting how many people fear Facebook

Sure they collect information. They aren't charging you for the use of their site, so their money comes from ad revenue. I never click on anything. They can try to sell stuff to me all they want, it doesn't influence what I buy.