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.
Related Stories
Facebook has released guidelines for publishers who want to appear in the "news feed":
Facebook has released new guidelines that outline how publishers can adapt to the company's efforts to fight back against fake/false news and other low-quality content.
Head of News Feed Adam Mosseri unveiled the guidelines at an event this morning at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, where he said they don't represent any changes to Facebook's approach — they're just a way for publishers to understand the strategy.
He added that Facebook's efforts in this area are "targeted at bad actors." But for legitimate publishers, the guidelines can still be important to "make sure you don't get caught up in the crosshairs."
Publishers have panicked at recent news feed changes:
The new feature Facebook is trying out is called Explore. It offers all sorts of stories it thinks might interest you, a separate news feed encouraging you to look further afield than just at what your friends are sharing. Meanwhile, for most people, the standard News Feed remains the usual mixture of baby photos and posts from companies or media organisations whose pages you have liked.
Sounds fine, doesn't it? Except that in six countries - Sri Lanka, Bolivia, Slovakia, Serbia, Guatemala, and Cambodia - the experiment went further. For users there, the main News Feed was cleared of everything but the usual stuff from your friends and sponsored posts - in other words, if you wanted to have your material seen in the place most users spend their time you had to pay for the privilege.
In a Medium post entitled "Biggest drop in organic reach we've ever seen", a Slovakian journalist Filip Struharik documented the impact. Publishers in his country were seeing just a quarter of the interactions they used to get before the change, he said. What had become a vital and vibrant platform for them was emptying out fast. Other journalists around the world have looked into the future and hate what they see. Their organisations have become addicted to Facebook as the one true way of reaching audiences and going cold turkey would be very painful.
Previously: The Tentacles of Facebook
Facebook is Going to Let Publishers Start Charging Readers to View Stories this Autumn
Google, Facebook Algorithms Promote 4chan Threads Identifying Wrong Man as Vegas Shooter
(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.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 29 2017, @01:13PM (1 child)
Didn't someone get the memo that that doesn't exist anymore since the war?
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday May 29 2017, @06:38PM
We have a shadow profile on Yugoslavia. It will be restored as soon as the TOS has been clicked. :p
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 29 2017, @01:16PM (1 child)
They're good music to listen to while coding.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 30 2017, @01:41PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hentai [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 29 2017, @01:21PM (3 children)
Thank you for bringing this theme up, SN. I live in Serbia, so this affects me in most direct and profound way.
This is a revelation, this site had been completely unknown to me till now!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 29 2017, @05:38PM (1 child)
Are you talking about Yugoslavia?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 29 2017, @06:15PM
...or Facebook?
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday May 29 2017, @06:17PM
How does it affect you?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 29 2017, @02:22PM
I was not aware that the government was hindered by those all that much.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 29 2017, @03:06PM (1 child)
...le disappoint.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Monday May 29 2017, @03:19PM
Liked!
Followed!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 29 2017, @03:34PM
Riiight. I'm sure it's a really big problem for Facebook's data collection if people stop giving all their data to Facebook in order to give all their data to another service offered by... Facebook.
(Score: 3, Informative) by el_oscuro on Monday May 29 2017, @04:09PM (1 child)
# Blocking facebook
# https://winbeginner.com/block-facebook-hosts-file-windows-pc/ [winbeginner.com]
127.0.0.1 facebook.com
127.0.0.1 www.facebook.com
127.0.0.1 login.facebook.com
127.0.0.1 www.login.facebook.com
127.0.0.1 static.ak.connect.facebook.com
127.0.0.1 connect.facebook.net
127.0.0.1 www.connect.facebook.net
127.0.0.1 apps.facebook.com
127.0.0.1 pixel.facebook.com
127.0.0.1 facebookinc.122.2o7.net
# Block Facebook IPv6
::1 facebook.com
::1 www.facebook.com
::1 login.facebook.com
::1 www.login.facebook.com
::1 static.ak.connect.facebook.com
::1 connect.facebook.net
::1 www.connect.facebook.net
::1 apps.facebook.com
::1 edge-star6-shv-02-ams2.facebook.com
SoylentNews is Bacon! [nueskes.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 29 2017, @06:31PM
Additions:
127.0.0.1 www.twitter.com
127.0.0.1 twitter.com
127.0.0.1 platform.twitter.com
127.0.0.1 urls.api.twitter.com
127.0.0.1 syndication.twitter.com
127.0.0.1 analytics.twitter.com
127.0.0.1 p.twitter.com
127.0.0.1 cdn.api.twitter.com
127.0.0.1 googleads.g.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 clients1.google.com
127.0.0.1 clients2.google.com
127.0.0.1 clients3.google.com
127.0.0.1 clients4.google.com
127.0.0.1 clients5.google.com
127.0.0.1 clients6.google.com
127.0.0.1 safebrowsing-cache.google.com
127.0.0.1 safebrowsing.google.com
127.0.0.1 imasdk.googleapis.com
127.0.0.1 play.google.com
127.0.0.1 alt1-safebrowsing.google.com
127.0.0.1 pagead2.googlesyndication.com
127.0.0.1 ssl.google-analytics.com
127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com
127.0.0.1 partner.googleadservices.com
127.0.0.1 sb.google.com
127.0.0.1 plusone.google.com
127.0.0.1 www.googleadservices.com
127.0.0.1 feedproxy.google.com
127.0.0.1 www.googletagservices.com
127.0.0.1 www.googletagmanager.com
127.0.0.1 plus.google.com
127.0.0.1 apis.google.com
127.0.0.1 www.googlecommerce.com
127.0.0.1 fonts.googleapis.com
127.0.0.1 tpc.googlesyndication.com
127.0.0.1 static.googleusercontent.com
127.0.0.1 cse.google.com
127.0.0.1 googleapis.l.google.com
127.0.0.1 crypto-js.googlecode.com
127.0.0.1 fonts.googleapis.com
127.0.0.1 consent.google.com
127.0.0.1 www-fc-opensocial.googleusercontent.com
127.0.0.1 themes.googleusercontent.com
127.0.0.1 storage.googleapis.com
127.0.0.1 id.google.com
127.0.0.1 ajax.googleapis.com
127.0.0.1 www.googleapis.com
127.0.0.1 redirector.googlevideo.com
127.0.0.1 id.google.com
127.0.0.1 translate.googleapis.com
127.0.0.1 googleads.g.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 static.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 pubads.g.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 cm.g.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 adx.g.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 bid.g.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 stats.g.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 survey.g.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 engine.phn.doublepimp.com
127.0.0.1 ad.doubleclick.com
127.0.0.1 securepubads.g.doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 windows.microsoft.com
127.0.0.1 ajax.microsoft.com
127.0.0.1 www.linkedin.com
127.0.0.1 platform.linkedin.com
127.0.0.1 farm2.staticflickr.com
127.0.0.1 embedr.flickr.com
127.0.0.1 widgets.flickr.com
127.0.0.1 heartbeat.flickr.com
127.0.0.1 platform.instagram.com
127.0.0.1 disq.us
127.0.0.1 slashdotmedia.com
127.0.0.1 c.amazon-adsystem.com
127.0.0.1 cdn.livefyre.com
127.0.0.1 cdn.optimizely.com
127.0.0.1 s7.addthis.com
Have a deep look at what traffic that leaves your computer is a good advice.
(Score: 2, Disagree) by idiot_king on Monday May 29 2017, @04:22PM (2 children)
It's easy to spot someone else's flaws and characteristics, but it is orders of magnitude harder to spot your own-- after all, why ever criticize yourself, or ever look inside yourself? That's painful and it's not fun.
Assuming Facebook is able to figure out the things you like and don't like over the course of years before you have to choose a career path, or even a job, it could feed this data back to you to offer options. Remember, as much as we want to think we know who we are, we often cannot choose the best paths for ourselves. Relying on deep learning, or just plain old data sets, we can have a look at how we have behaved in our past, or simply have Facebook spit out a few answer for us. Granted, this won't work for everyone, but for the 90% who it WILL work for, it's better than jumping from career to career, degree to degree, or menial wage job to menial wage job without any sort of path for growth. This would be a better use of this technology, one that actually frees us in many ways rather than constricts us in many ways. We primarily are what we do, and what we do and how we act is how we are known by others, not the internal workings of our mental states. A healthier approach to career paths will help our mental state out, anyway.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday May 29 2017, @06:22PM
Facebook advice you that the best you could do with your life is to work at Amazon as a data entry person for free McBurgers and sleep under the desk while bathing in the corporate pond now and then.
This free advice were sponsored by the federal reserve and Bezoz philanthropy Inc.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Monday May 29 2017, @10:23PM
> it's better than jumping from career to career, degree to degree
Somehow I fear that companies that treat employees like "human resources" won't choose the path that is best for YOU but the one that is best for THEM. They want to lower wages? let's have more people doing that profession.
Especially Facebook.
"more than 15 percent of Facebook’s domestic employees relied on temporary H-1B visas last year—more than other tech companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, or Apple—giving Facebook the legal classification of being a H-1B “dependent” company" full article [vanityfair.com]
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by Spamalope on Monday May 29 2017, @06:20PM (1 child)
It appears that we can run but no hide.
You can add lots of intentionally false information.
Weave it in with the true stuff.
Now that I think of it, I want a Windows domain system that does the following:
Spin up temporary template VMs, Vlan into a private network, destroy after each run
Load random users roaming profile with cookies and flash cookies
compile a visit list using trending data on search engines; links on 4chan/8chan/twitter/tumblr (pick randomized samples from key word searches in addition to embedded links)
Note the ones heavy with trackers (quant and the like in addition to the 'like' button trackers) and add them to a list for all VM runs to visit so they're maximally tracked, age out entries so the list stays fresh
'View' Youtube videos as well to make sure Alphabet maximally tracks (script making gmail profiles?)
And - then add searches and page visits to websites based on the most expensive ad keywords to advertise on. Make these fake people look really, really profitable. (things like Mesothelioma so the profile will seem like an asbestos lawsuit payday or the like) So the stalkers will sell the contact info expensively... and it will be wrong, making the stalkers service less trustworthy and valuable. (This is the are where you'd product taste to figure out the most useful info to spoof)
Use load feedback from the router to throttle so only 'excess' bandwidth is used
Add some VPNs between a few major companies shifting some of the traffic between them and you'd be hard to filter out. Make a 'spoofing at home' component so home systems can be used to spread some traffic around and it'll be hard to fingerprint and filter out the bad data.
Seems like a good kickstarter project!
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday May 29 2017, @06:33PM
Sounds like a feature implementation list for a open source project right there. Had similar ideas for some time now.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday May 30 2017, @12:56PM (1 child)
Everyone expects a social media persona, so supply one. I do. I post something innocuous every couple of years, designed to reflect a happy member of the herd.
Decades before the advent of the medium Robert Heinlein wrote a lot of books, and bits and pieces of what he wrote stuck with me. In one of his books, perhaps "The Number of the Beast" or "The Cat Who Walks Through Walls" he strongly recommended blending in where you live, to "Do As the Romans Do." If everyone goes to church, go to church, sing loud, even if you don't believe. If the mores of the community are staid, keep a chaste demeanor. Et cetera. In this case, if everyone else has a social media presence, do you likewise.
Then, in another book, "Friday," his character maintained social camouflage by creating data patterns through credit chip usage that conformed to what people would expect from a normal member of society; when she had missions to perform, she used cash, ie. she stepped outside the dominant paradigm entirely and acted in ways they could not trace and would not look for.
Synthesizing all that, I approach social media. I only post things that are true, because disprovable data are a red flag. But the elements I publish conform to a persona I want to project, and nothing else. Maybe it's silly and completely unnecessary, but my horror would be greater if the future proved such a thing indispensible, and I hadn't done so.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 30 2017, @02:04PM
The only real downside I see to this approach is now the marketing drones can truthfully say they hold yet another warm body. This is classic prisoner's dilemma, everybody acting in the way that's likely saving their bacon leads to worst outcome for the society as whole.