[Foghorn] Humor, ma’am, it’s called humor [/Foghorn]
(a) Not that I’m not used to it, its just that I think its overall a corrosive element in society. Purely MHO.
To lazy to go back and look through previous posts, but not sure I ever said I hated Facebook for everyone, just that I consider it a huge timesuck for me. If you don’t agree, well, go post something on FB! That’'ll show me. 
Running a hack to force avatars is a weak replacement for actual avatars.
They could activate avatars and leave the default as off, and the experience would be the same for the fogeys.
Fogeyism is an ever-present danger. A thousand years ago serfs were bitching about the horse collar, today it’s FB, tomorrow it will be sex robots.
I didn’t mean you in particular.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to upload an instagram of my pancakes.
I, for one, will welcome our new sex robot overlords.
I post on facebook primarily to join in with my fellow pro-vaxxers. We make fun of the anti-vax nuts, post good information about vaccines whenever an article on vaccines appears on online and share the latest info about vaccine research with each other. Sometimes when you’re arguing with morons like Ann Daschel or Lowell Hubbs for the fifth time in three days, it is nice to have backup.
The site’s also just a useful little tool to help me keep up with some of my friend’s lives. You just have to figure out how to manage it. I always put my best face forward when posting because it is so public and I have an easily googleable name. I love that when someone looks me up over there they see my adorable children, cute husband, well paying job and the cover of my first book. I also love knowing that an asshole who was mean to me in high school now has a really badly paying horribly crappy job or that someone I despised is now on hubby number three and expecting to be a grandmother for the third time at 40 from her fuckup daughter with the drug problem.
I also want people to use it because we bought a small amount of the stock, damn it. Now get to posting on it so I can make money! 
I agree that you have an opinion. It’s just utterly uninformed.
Nobody needs to use the data to infer the age of the crust on an average user’s underwear. That’s hardly the point. Learning something useful about portfolios of several million at a time is. If better segmentation and offer delivery increases a merchant’s response rate or cost of acquisition by a few basis points, then it might be well worth it, especially if the merchant is only paying a few cents per eyeball.
Despite individual attempts to “game” information-collection efforts, consumers tend to look broadly alike within clusters. Once you can make a good guess what cluster someone falls into (and this takes very little information), you can start doing all sorts of interesting things.
Sweet! I might have to look into learning how to do that some day.
That would be my preference, and I truly don’t understand why it is such a terrible thing to have avatars here, when the default can easily be set to “off” and people have to opt in.
Sex robots are a harsh master.
OK, now show me where Facebook does these things. I always look at the ads Facebook serves up to me because I want to see how I’m being “tracked.” The best they’ve been able to do is show an ad for a concert at my alma mater and serve up a ton of ads for Facebook games because I play a lot of Bejeweled.
Holy shit! The black helicopters are surely after me!
Tell me more. 
You say that your experience means that Facebook doesn’t mine your personal data, while to me, it just means that you aren’t a very high value user. You get some broadly advertised, above-the-line trash and think that this means that no one is trying to learn things about you. I don’t know very much about you, but I can make a few guesses. You probably make less than $50k a year, do not buy luxury brands, you do not have a high travel & entertainment budget, nor do you live in a particularly affluent zip code. I have every reason to believe you are single, are passionate about video games, and probably do not own your own home. I could probably narrow you down to three or four Prizm codes and estimate how much disposable income you have every month. If I were a merchant, I would not pay very much to deliver an ad to your facebook.
There are no black helicopters that I know of coming for you, not to worry. I don’t work for facebook, so I do not know what their analytics environment looks like. I do know they hire a lot of people with strong machine learning backgrounds whose talents I presume are not wasted. I have spent years in analytics designing products to make inferences about people. With practice, it’s possible to get pretty creative and make money with data that don’t look like much.
Sorry, not even close.
I suspect there may be some confusion about what I mean by “high” and “affluent”. Otherwise, if you are not an unmarried male librarian who lives in (I think) a city in upstate NY and plays a lot of console games, then perhaps your life has changed quite a bit.
OK, so you were closer than I originally thought. But I’m married and have owned my own home for many years now.
But I guess this is my problem with data mining. Even when you have all the information (I’ve mentioned my home and my wife on these boards many times, just not as often as my gaming habit), you’re still going to get a bunch of misses.
For example, I just opened Facebook and was given seven ads…
- 2 were for other Facebook games I don’t play.
- 1 was for a shoe store
- 1 was for hard liquor
- 1 was for a food-by-mail service
- 1 was for a local coffee house
- 1 was for a local bar
All very general things, but the ad server missed when it picked a shoe store (my clothes are very basic) and two alcohol-related ads (I never drink). And my likes and posting history would give it no reason to choose those things.
Ok. I didn’t try to stalk you or search your name, I was just going on memory. But I think the real point I was trying to make is that people update this stuff voluntarily on facebook. When it is linked to revealed preferences, it is very powerful.
Of course. Like I said, the purpose isn’t to do detailed detective work on individuals but to make big inferences about entire portfolios. Data miners aren’t right all the time about everyone, they are consistently a few basis points more right than conventional marketing methods across large groups of people. Individuals with similar demographics tend to have similar consumer preferences all things being equal. So all you have to do is make an educated guess about what segment a person belongs to and you can be more successful.
Not all ads are microtargeted. Many of them are just “get me 1 million eyeballs within a fifty mile radius” sort of thing. You wouldn’t need an ad for a game you do play, so the ads for games you don’t are just attempts to acquire you.
Facebook won’t know whether you drink or not. Local ads may or may not be targeted. But your demographic probably indexes highly for bar and coffee shop use, so there you go. If I were a coffee shop owner, I’d probably just want to contact a few thousand people in my zip under the age of 30 or whatever.
But then this loops back around to my “Why does anyone give a shit?” question. Making the educated guess that people who play games might be interested in other games and people in their early 30s like bars and coffee shops don’t require any analysis at all.
That piece doesn’t, which is why your local coffee shop probably did not pay for anything very sophisticated. When does it start getting intrusive? And how else can an individual control that save by monitoring carefully what gets shared?
Apropos of nothing, a close friend who just broke off her engagement was less than thrilled to have Facebook suggest Match.com’s page in her news feed.
This. There are plenty of things to hate about facebook, and I certainly am not a fan of businesses that want me to like their pages… so I don’t. There’s plenty of good stuff about it though. I’m really into a lot of underground music and being able to follow a bunch of bands and communities surrounding it make it really easy to keep up on things, just a couple days ago I found out a band I had no reason to check up on because they hadn’t released anything in eight years and otherwise wouldn’t have heard of since their fanbase is pretty small is releasing a new album because I had liked their fanpage and it showed up in my feed.
And sure, they get access to all of your pictures… so what? Do you think the facebook employees are taking your family photos home or something? Yeah, don’t be a moron and post potentially compromising photos on that, but that’s common sense for posting photos to the internet in general. I don’t care if someone else can see them as long as the people I want to see them can. If they’re that private, I’d handle them somewhere else.
And yeah, they make money from the information they get from me, but that’s what keeps it free. I don’t just wantonly post every little detail about myself, if it’s private it’s not on there, but if they connect that I like certain shows and movies and music and foods and have targetted ads at me so I can continue to keep in touch with friends and family, I’m okay with that. That’s part of the trade-off and, hell, if ads are properly targetted, I might actually be happy to see them show me a product that I want rather than be annoyed.
So, yeah, it’s an imperfect tool, and a lot of people use it stupidly, posting dumb pictures, spreading drama, creating arguments, all that sort of stuff. But people do that all over the internet and in real life, so what’s it matter?
