Community is where you make it
What the F*** Was Facebook Thinking? This is the best article I’ve read on the amount and type of information any Facebook application could get:
Your name. Your location. All your friends. Your family. Your work history. Your schooling. Your birthday. Your checkins. Your events. Your hometown. Your likes, photos. Your relationships. Your religion and politics.
And not just for you, but for one and a half billion other people.
While you’re at it, also read My Cow Game Extracted Your Facebook Data.
To be honest, I’m not even sure I know what the Facebook platform’s terms of service dictated that I do with user data acquired from Facebook. Technically, users could revoke certain app permissions later, and apps were supposed to remove any impacted data that they had stored. I doubt most apps did that, and I suspect users never knew–and still don’t know–that revoking access to an app they used eight years ago doesn’t do anything to reverse transmissions that took place years ago.
Insert pithy statement about closing the stable door after the horse has bolted here.
More than two years ago, I started an experiment with Facebook: I hide the sources I don’t want to see anymore. I started with the Buzzfeed quizzes, then moved on to the radio stations and their silly news stories. I hid the parody sites, the viral meme sites, the sports teams’ sites.
But I kept some news sites. The Wall Street Journal. NPR. OPB. The Washington Post. The NY Times.1Turns out, I noted this in a footnote in a previous post. ‘Course, you probably already noticed that, being the type that reads footnotes and all… ;-)
These are reputable sources. I shouldn’t have to worry about them, right?
Wrong!
Facebook doesn’t see itself as a news media company.2It’s an ad serving company. It sells eyeballs to advertisers. It fired its human editors and replaced them with an algorithm.
Facebook’s algorithm’s goal is not to keep us educated and informed, to show us a balanced cross-section of news. Instead, Facebook wants to keep us on Facebook. It does that by watching us closely and determining what our political views are.3Thanks to all those Facebook “like” buttons across the web, Facebook knows what you read on the internet. Then it feeds us news that agrees with our biases.
It doesn’t matter that I haven’t blocked a news source with a different political perspective. Facebook won’t show it to me. Facebook wants to keep me happy — and as a byproduct, ignorant.
I made a decision to expand my Facebook experiment: no news on Facebook, period.4Yeah, I know. I’ll still see news from those sources I haven’t yet blocked. But only once. It has made a huge difference in my Facebook newsfeed. I see more baby pictures, more vacation pictures, and more statuses.
I’ll get my news elsewhere.5For those that are interested, that elsewhere currently is Twitter. I intentionally follow people with whom I disagree. They are good at finding those sources I’ll have the most difficulties with.
Five Labs characterized my personality1Personalities are analyzed according to the Big Five personality traits. by analyzing the words in my Facebook posts:2Five Labs examined the linguistic content using a method “based on a study published by H. Andrew Schwartz and colleagues from the University of Pennsylvania’s World Well-Being Project.
Brent is restless, inventive, and reserved.3I’m tempted to disagree, but maybe that would just prove its validity. I do question its validity for everyone, though. One person I analyzed showed very different traits than in real life. Maybe all that proves is that we can be very different people on social media than in person.
If that’s all it did, Five Lab’s analysis would be interesting.4Some may question why I’d post personal results on a public blog. I have a couple of responses: (1) if the results are accurate, those who know me aren’t surprised; those who don’t, don’t know whether they are or not. (2) I have a ton of public postings here on my blog. Not posting the results doesn’t prevent anyone from doing a similar analysis with an even larger data source. However, what makes it cool is Five Labs showing me which of my friends’ and selected public figures’ personalities are closest to mine. Turns out, Bill Gates and I could be twins.5I wonder if he’d agree. ;-) All the same, notice the similarity in poses for our profile pictures. Also, Bill’s personality traits matched closer than any of my friends’ traits did. ;-)
Five Labs also lets me analyze my friends’ personalities, even those who apparently haven’t yet specifically authorized Five Labs to see their walls as I did. I bet they didn’t know they were authorizing that when they friended me. I didn’t either.6It’s amazing how much information we leak on the Internet, even on Facebook. Or maybe, this is just what it means when we authorize apps our friends use to see our data. Makes sense?
Maybe you’d like to let Five Labs analyze your personality. Or maybe you already have. Did you agree with the results?
Update. It appears that the last assertion is no longer true. As more of my friends have done this analysis, it turns out that one of my friends is an 88% match. Sorry, Bill… ;-)
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MIT Technology Review mentioned the Friendship Paradox, in which, due to outliers and “the topology of networks,” your friends on average have more friends than you do. The article goes on to suggest that your friends probably are more wealthy and happy, too.
I was curious to see how my Facebook friends’ friend counts measured up. My Facebook friends average 434 friends.1My data isn’t perfect, because 24 of my friends prevent me from seeing their entire friend list; I can only see mutual friends. Thus I have no idea how many Facebook friends those friends have. Only 67% of my FB friends have less than that many friends, so the article could be false for 33% of my FB friends (including me).
This also explains my two previous posts.
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WolframAlpha has analyzed the personal analytics of those who donated their Facebook data to W|A. Today, they posted some of the results on their blog.
Curious to see how I compare, here are a selected few results from my analytics.
My friend cluster shows five tight clusters for:
Scattered around are pockets of Intel people, Portland people, and those from a previous job. Notably absent are friends from law school. I’d like to say I have them on LinkedIn, but my mom taught me not to lie. ;-)
Again, my Facebook friends’ ages match typical for the sample data, exhibiting the double humps centered around my age and my kids’ ages. It’s nice to see some friends to the far right.
Yeah, I’m generally upbeat. But you already knew that. :-)
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A reminder to my friends on Facebook.
Image credit: “If it’s on the internet, it isn’t private” by DonkeyHotey. Used under a Creative Commons license.
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