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posted by cmn32480 on Thursday February 15 2018, @02:48AM   Printer-friendly
from the what-could-possibly-go-wrong? dept.

We've got great news this week for nation-state employees tasked with using social media to spark a class war in previously stable democracies! Facebook is patenting technology to decide if its users are upper, middle or working class -- without even using the usual marker for social class: an individual's income (the patent considers this a benefit).

Facebook's patent plan for "Socioeconomic Group Classification Based on User Features" uses different data sources and qualifiers to determine whether a user is "working class," "middle class," or "upper class." It uses things like a user's home ownership status, education, number of gadgets owned, and how much they use the internet, among other factors. If you have one gadget and don't use the internet much, in Facebook's eyes you're probably a poor person.

Facebook's application says the algorithm is intended for use by "third parties to increase awareness about products or services to online system users." Examples given include corporations and charities.

Engadget


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by anubi on Thursday February 15 2018, @05:56AM (2 children)

    by anubi (2828) on Thursday February 15 2018, @05:56AM (#638098) Journal

    Another Los Angelino here... ( or in the immediate vicinity ).

    I, too, have noticed the homeless having a lot of stuff - free phones - SNAP cards - EBT cards - WIC cards - and they have time to ply the social media.

    Me, its here, and Oilburners.net . One's for techie stuff, and the other is for my old Diesel IDI van - as the Oilburners site specializes in technical advice and education for those of us who maintain our own stuff.

    I flat do not have time for useless gab. I could care less who wore what, or who won the game. I am far more interested in techie stuff like exactly how these new malwares are corrupting our machinery, how to diagnose engine malfunctions on my van, how to maintain it, and what kind of retrofits are worthwhile, and which are just gigantic wastes of money. Especially useful are the feedbacks as to which remanufacturers are vending useless "rebuilt" parts.

    Many years ago, I hung around +Fravia's site more than anything else. You can even see remnants of his site by looking for mirrors of searchlores.org.

    One thing that became painfully obvious to me is when the "upper class" take over an organization, their main need is to have any information delivered to them by a mouth tastefully mounted atop starched collar, suit, and tie. Presentation is everything. Substance is dime-a-dozen.

    I would be scoffed at as I tried to relate what I was seeing on Searchlores, and how we were leaving ourselves wide open by building stuff certain ways. Why would that kind of information be valuable to men earning $300K/year? They had far more important information... networking skills with men that will pay them $300K/year! Techie stuff is so boring, you know.

    I am sure everyone here has had that same problem when we read of all the chicanery going on in our operating systems, but are powerless to correct the situation at work, only because a highly-paid wearer-of-the-suit is standing in the way.

    I watched as our technical base evaporated as the highly-paid men of the suit layed us off, or encouraged us into retirement, so the highly paid ones would be the most knowledgeable left in the organization. Congress would still fund us big-time, despite our guts being gone. All we had left was the theatrical salesmanship ops. Any Congressman could count on numerous handshakes as part of a business relationship with us, but forget any deliverables. The people who did the work weren't there anymore.

    I see this Facebook the same. It lets the monied people easily find someone to take their money, shake their hand, then tell them via mouths mounted above starched collar, suit, and tie, that more money is needed before anything will happen... while knowing all along nothing can happen... the company is like a plane without an engine. Looks great on the tarmac. Won't go. But the object is presentation. Sell promises and tickets, then vamoose and re-emerge under another name somewhere else.

    I know I spend a lot of time finding out who yaps, and who does the work. The people who yap a lot will be on Facebook. That's how they get their business. They network. But they are not the type of folks I want to deal with if I am having a problem getting my VSS signal through the PSOM so the E4OD does not erratically shift.

    The monied class is often so high above the working class that they prefer the presentation skills of the yapper, more than they value the craftsmanship skills of a do-er. A do-er is typically dirty and has dirt under his nails. Lower-class. Unimportant. So they talk to the suit - which is like me either taking my stuff to the "stealership", or doing business with a well-dressed door-to-door. When one is monied enough, they can be taken to the cleaners over and over and over - ESPECIALLY if they are empowered to invest other people's money. So no wonder they will turn to Facebook. They can get the money out of their pocket and tick that little box about having "taken action" to address some issue. There are several orders of magnitude of finances to get a job done, according to which route and how much resources one has to either use or squander.

    One will really have to work to find out who the actual do-ers are. They are few and far between. Yappers are everywhere.

    --
    "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by PiMuNu on Thursday February 15 2018, @12:59PM (1 child)

    by PiMuNu (3823) on Thursday February 15 2018, @12:59PM (#638209)

    Anecdote, so worthless whinge:

    I know someone who is working on a nuclear waste storage facility. A Nuclear Waste Storage Facility. Ya know, don't want to screw that up. The senior management don't know the first thing about the design. What is worse, they discourage their staff from learning about the facility design, telling them to just hire a bunch of contractors. They are actively encouraging their staff to become a bunch of paper pushers with no technical knowledge. After all, if one contractor hits a bus, you can just pull in another one. There is no one in the entire organisation who actually understands how the Nuclear Waste Storage Facility works from end to end (ya know, worrying about what happens if it leaks, worrying about how all of the waste gets in, what if the 50 year old legacy waste is Not what you think, etc etc). Gah!

    • (Score: 1) by anubi on Saturday February 17 2018, @06:09AM

      by anubi (2828) on Saturday February 17 2018, @06:09AM (#639240) Journal

      Thanks for the reality check. I came off not so hot on that.

      I was still mentally fuming over another report I had read on malware when I posted. Yet again - a result of mixing executables from arbitrary sources into data.

      I knew about this since the days of the ANSI bomb. How to screw up someone else's machine with nothing more than a text file... if I could get them to turn ANSI on. So, we had "ANSI Art" which had to have ANSI on to see it, but one never knew if the art had a bomb in it for them until they looked at in first in a plain text ascii editor.

      Knowing how that trick worked, I saw this same paradigm vended in other incarnations.... and recognized it for what it was. I *knew* how risky it is to mix code and data. Especially if you were not the author of it and was getting those documents from elsewhere.

      But I lacked the "presentation skills" necessary to convince the Men of the Suit not to do this kind of thing.

      They were not interested in this technical detail crap.... they had several millions of dollars in their pocket to spend, and they were under pressure to tick a box somewhere that they had "taken action" to address some other problem - and that money was already earmarked - to go to their friends - just as their friends were getting earmarked money to send to them. One great elite handshaking party.

      I have known about this flaw in our computational infrastructure, since its inception, and bleated about it profusely, for 30 years, to no avail.

      I see this crap all over the place today. No-one can trust their machine. The suit people earned their millions.

      I got laid off.

      If I were a metallurgist and saw that fastening iron plating with brass screws was a bad idea, would the suit man even pay attention to me, or continue to tolerate disintegrating ships? Well, right now, we tolerate machines we can't trust. And its not just me that sees the problem. I think all of us at least at Soylent well know what the problem is. But our Congress still keeps protecting the "right" of those who want to keep us ignorant, and won't pass legislation to hold the makers of all this mischief responsible.

      Nobody wanted an old general purpose power/analog/digital/refrigeration man. They could buy what I did, made in China. The big thing was how to monopolize and monetize, not how to build or do. And it really gets my goat to see our country going into homelessness and debt while the rich elite crow about how much more they have as they work with Congress to make law creating artificial shortages by "rights" legislation.

      I may be making an ass of myself again by even posting this. When I think of these things, I get pissed. And when I am pissed, I do not write nicely.

      This was a long post to write on a stale topic, but I will leave it for posterity - just in case I am on someone's snoop list and they want to see what's egging me on so.

      --
      "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]