SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
A look inside the company and its astonishing reach into our daily lives through a series of studies conducted by Share Labs, first reported by the BBC but without linking directly to the material posted by Share Labs.
Share Lab is a research team based in Yugoslavia: "Where indie data punk, meets media theory pop to investigate digital rights blues"
For those of us born and raised before Facebook, life has many different aspects: work, family, hobbies. In each context we may behave differently and other people might have a different impression of our personality but Facebook, by mixing it all together, is causing a "context collapse", no longer partitioning our lives.
However, one of Zuckerberg's fears is "context restoration" whereas users become aware of the Panopticon and choose to "behave" in Facebook withholding essential data and thus ruining Facebook's algorithms. It may become a LinkedIn type of site, where everything posted is highly curated for professional purposes and the "social" migrates to other platforms, such as Instagram.
It is possible that in the near future Facebook and LinkedIn will be competing for the same market: professional or skilled traders and lose some of its potency. That is why Facebook is extending its reach to other websites, tracking both Facebook users and others to keep harvesting data about our daily activities and testing algorithms to influence every decision we make.
As Douglas Rushkoff puts it:
"Facebook will market you your future before you've even gotten there, they'll use predictive algorithms to figure out what's your likely future and then try to make that even more likely. They'll get better at programming you – they'll reduce your spontaneity. "
As we all know, your social media profile has become of interest to would-be employers, law-enforcement and of course, advertisers. Some have started to demand wages for using Facebook, as we are creating the "product" they sell.
Those afraid of Big Government should be very afraid of behemoths like Facebook, Amazon, Google, Apple and others which are not hindered by the constitution or human rights. It appears that we can run but no hide.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Geezer on Monday May 29 2017, @12:53PM (13 children)
Perhaps appropriately on US Memorial Day, stories like TFS make me reflect on what we oldsters pretty much expected, enabled, and brought upon ourselves, with Big Data: the death of privacy.
Sure, groups like EFF and the ACLU are trying to put the genie back in the bottle, but there's no going back. The commercial and governmental Big Data panopticons could not have happened without the scientists and engineers who made them possible, like the Manhattan Project rock stars, generations ago, who gave us nuclear energy, and on back throughout history where technological and scientific breakthroughs often came at a sad cost.
No good deed goes unpunished.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by a-zA-Z0-9$_.+!*'(),- on Monday May 29 2017, @02:01PM (12 children)
the loss of privacy isn't a one-way genie-out-of-the-bottle like nuclear energy. Facebook relies on active participation, unlike nuclear power. I can't opt out of my local utility, but I can and do opt out of facebook.
https://newrepublic.com/article/114112/anonymouth-linguistic-tool-might-have-helped-jk-rowling
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Monday May 29 2017, @03:10PM (2 children)
Absolutely: from what i'm hearing, 'Facebook is for old people'... if the old people are smart and get off facepoop (or die!!), then facepoop should just disappear.
Leave facebook and help bring it's demise on quicker... and start fighting for your privacy.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday May 30 2017, @01:05PM
That's an important point. How many people now fear Friendster? They did the same thing before Facebook. MySpace? That was even bought by one of the Architects of Evil, and it's still gone and irrelevant.
Facebook amassed a huge database they can monetize for years, but if its userbase crashes the way the others have, it will be a dead, not living, datastore.
The young, too, have long since moved on. It was Instagram, but now it's SnapChat. The old might linger on FB for a while yet, but they're not who advertisers chase. Have fun marketing to septuagenarians on fixed incomes, guys.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by a-zA-Z0-9$_.+!*'(),- on Wednesday May 31 2017, @03:35AM
facepoop! highlarious.
https://newrepublic.com/article/114112/anonymouth-linguistic-tool-might-have-helped-jk-rowling
(Score: 4, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday May 29 2017, @03:30PM
You can opt out of Facebook, but it's increasingly hard to opt out of all such tracking. If you deal only in cash everywhere, only browse the internet with maximum privacy settings enabled (which frequently disables a large amount of websites), etc. then maybe. Even then, your information may still be available in various public databases, which technically may have been public before, but only available to people who physically went to a government archive or something and searched records manually. (So one used to have more privacy through obscurity.)
Facebook is only one factor in the general trend for loss of privacy, and one of the few that's easy to control without potentially creating some significant inconvenience.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Geezer on Monday May 29 2017, @04:35PM
Facebook is just the biggest "face" of the genie. The problem is Big Data running amok in general, not just one, albeit large, implementation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 29 2017, @04:50PM (5 children)
Can you?
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/10/18/1429223/facebook-is-building-shadow-profiles-of-non-users [slashdot.org]
https://spideroak.com/articles/facebook-shadow-profiles-a-profile-of-you-that-you-never-created [spideroak.com]
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday May 29 2017, @06:15PM (4 children)
I would say you can but it's hard. Time for a reset of all personal information once in a while? like when moving to a new address it could be exploited by creating a new email address, phone number, website etc.. Blocking all tracker sites goes without saying of course. Any computerphone better be installed with a decently safe OS.
The main issue is likely to avoid sharing personal information with people that have poor information hygiene. And for those inclined to write bots that stuff facebook and all the others with fake data and keep it active. A program could stitch together photos and videos of random people to make the algorithms infer wrong connections.
Here's a useful list from 2011 slashgreen:
Take twitter and doubleclick etc too.
Don't visit the CrookHook. All their messages are deceitful and only serves to pull you in further.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 29 2017, @06:23PM (3 children)
That'd be "friends" and "family" :/
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday May 29 2017, @06:36PM (2 children)
Though choices..
But why not give your next girlfriend a fake name whenever she's at a family gathering? And no photos because some "old ex-boyfriend is stalking her". Be inventive..
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 29 2017, @06:51PM (1 child)
Yeah that will work. LOL.
What you meant to say was "Be single.."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 29 2017, @09:31PM
Well, if they're that shallow, good riddance.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Monday May 29 2017, @05:42PM
> I can and do opt out of facebook.
According to instructions I found which date from 2011, one must create a Facebook account for oneself in order to opt out:
-- http://www.networkworld.com/article/2228269/microsoft-subnet/facebook-photos--opt-out-or-tag-you-re-it.html [networkworld.com]
-- http://www.socialmediatoday.com/content/how-disable-opt-out-facebook-photo-tagging [socialmediatoday.com]
Of course there's the option of avoiding people who have cameras and use Facebook, or not telling those people one's name.