Tag: facebook

If you are not the customer, then you are the product [Link]

[via GigaOm]

Facebook will pay out $9 million to approximately 614,000 users as part of a $20 million legal settlement that is intended to compensate users for the social network’s decision to display their pictures in “sponsored stories” ads without permission.

for all the booface fans out there [article]

booface had its first annual shareholder meeting on Tuesday. Here’s a short report. Also an indication of what happens when you have more money than sense:

“Facebook shareholder says she does not know how to use Facebook. She bought thousands of shares at $35 apiece. Also wants investment advice.”

And if you have the heart (or time) to listen, an audio recording of the proceedings (90 minutes long)

How Facebook and Brooklyn Killed America’s Obsession With Cars [Article]

Why aren’t kids interested in cars anymore, at least in the US? Brian Merchant has some part of the answer.

That “liberation” you get from the car is fleeting—it quickly fades, first into schlepping your buddies around town, then into speeding tickets, and eventually into brain-numbing commutes across smoggy, congested highways. You realize that cars are ultimately confined to roads clogged with other cars, running on the same limiting rails—like trains, just more dangerous, and no drinking.

A Qualitative Study of Regrets on Facebook [Article]

Ever post something to facebook (what, you have a facebook account??) & immediately (or a bit later) regretted it? A Qualitative Study of Regrets on Facebook – This must be the most entertaining research paper ever written! (pdf download).

..little is known about the problematic aspects of Facebook usage. Our research fills that gap by showing that regrettable postings are not unusual. We devised a detailed taxonomy of regrets and discovered that they are mainly centered around sensitive topics, emotional content, and unintended audience. Furthermore, our results agree with many news stories that report that regrettable postings on Facebook can yield serious ramifications for users.

facebook’s graph search [article, links]

About a year or so ago, I decided to quit my experiment with facebook – for a variety of reasons that I wrote a post about at the time. It has grown surreptitiously from a tool that simply helped connect people to something more nefarious, (or so it appears to my reptilian brain) – but don’t take my word for it. 
Tech commentator Tom Scott, who is among those invited to test Graph Search, a new feature, demonstrated what he found using Graph Search on this page: .. [it] has served up lists of family members of people who live in China and like Falun Gong, people who like the extreme rightwing group English Defence League but also enjoy a curry, and Islamic men who are interested in other men and live in Tehran, where homosexuality is persecuted.  Other lists included Tesco employees who like horses, a reference to the discovery of horse DNA in burgers sold by the supermarket chain, and spouses of people who like Ashley Madison, a dating site for people already in relationships. 
Are you male, & interested in searching for single women in your area who are looking for men & ‘like’ getting drunk? Or some more insidious ones that I won’t even mention here? Easy peasy! How much information about you/ your kids do you want strangers to know?
The implications are far more serious than some harmless searches, but I will leave that to the newspaper headlines that will no doubt hit us soon enough. The Guardian & the Slate weigh in with their thoughts. 
This is how to change your privacy settings if you want to stay on facebook. Better still, this is how you delete your account.  And download a copy of your data before you do so.