{"id":679,"date":"2013-08-02T14:57:14","date_gmt":"2013-08-02T09:27:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nispaara.com\/blog\/?p=679"},"modified":"2019-06-03T17:33:02","modified_gmt":"2019-06-03T12:03:02","slug":"connecting-the-dots-facebook-shows-the-world-how-much-it-knows-about-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nispaara.com\/blog\/connecting-the-dots-facebook-shows-the-world-how-much-it-knows-about-them\/","title":{"rendered":"Connecting the dots: Facebook shows the world how much it knows about them"},"content":{"rendered":"

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]You\u2019ve gotta give Facebook credit for its relentless drive to harvest and exploit the data of its billion users. Facebook knows where you are, where you\u2019re from, the places you Like, the people you know, and what you\u2019re interested in \u2014 as soon as it makes its way to wearable computers it\u2019ll probably know when you\u2019re sleeping or awake, like a technologically twisted version of Santa Claus. The company is making some of that data easier to discover with Graph Search<\/a>, a social search tool that will begin rolling out to all US-based Facebook users today<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Graph Search is advertised as a tool that will make it easier to discover your friends\u2019 interests, the places they check-in to, their photos, and \u201cfriends of friends.\u201d It\u2019s also the closest many people will come to learning just how much personal information they\u2019re sharing without even realizing it. Given the recent reports concerning PRISM<\/a>, an initiative through which the National Security Agency is able to collect data (or metadata) from companies like Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and others, this demonstration of Facebook\u2019s knowledge should offer the masses some idea of the extent to which their privacy has been invaded.<\/p>\n

Put another way: Facebook has built a consumer-focused tool that highlights just how much information can be gleaned from seemingly worthless data. And it\u2019s doing so just weeks after the Guardian reported that it was helping the US government spy on, well, everyone. That takes some gall.<\/p>\n

The current iteration of Graph Search relies on data knowingly provided by Facebook\u2019s users. The company can\u2019t yet divine your birthday, hometown, or work on its own; you have to tell it all of those things, and, if you\u2019re feeling charitable, what kind of music you like, what movies you\u2019ve seen recently, who you\u2019re dating, and where you are at any given moment. This might change in the future, as the New York Times reports<\/a> that Facebook is working to improve Graph Search\u2019s results by parsing the contents of individual Status Updates and data from third-party services like Yelp or Instagram. You already tell Facebook so much \u2014 you\u2019re about to tell it so much more.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s just the data you know you\u2019re sharing. Every time you use Facebook, however, you\u2019re also generating a whole other class of data called metadata \u2014 literally \u201cdata about data\u201d \u2014 that is often shared without your consent or knowledge. You automatically share your name, your birthday, your location, and the device you\u2019re using to access Facebook, according to the Guardian<\/a>; some of these, such as your location, can be blocked on the device level, but others are attached to everything you share whether you like it \u2014 or know it \u2014 or not.<\/p>\n

Immersion<\/a>, a tool developed by a team within MIT Media Lab, shows how metadata can be used to glean information about a subject. In Immersion\u2019s case the data is sourced from Gmail (you can check the data associated with your account at the tool\u2019s website) and simply shows who you\u2019ve been emailing, how those people are connected to each other<\/a>, and how often you interact with each.\u00a0Even such a limited tool is able to show the connections between Gmail users \u2014 and with metadata, as with life, so much of it is simply about who you know.<\/p>\n

Much more could be gleaned from Facebook\u2019s metadata. Someone might be able to find out how often you go to a particular movie theater, even if you never check-in. Who you\u2019re with every night, even if neither of you tags the other in a Status Update. Where you\u2019re from, where you\u2019ve been, and with whom you\u2019ve travelled. All of this data is currently stored on Facebook\u2019s servers as a mind-bogglingly large number of disparate dots; imagine what might be gleaned if someone were able to connect even a fraction of them.<\/p>\n

Graph Search shows what can be done when the dots associated with publicly-available information are connected. It should also serve as an example of what someone with the proper motivation could do if they were to access all of those public dots and connect them to other data that you probably didn\u2019t even know you were sharing. Facebook built Graph Search to prove that Likes could be worth something, to offer yet another marketing tool to its advertisers, and to show that it was more than a time-suck devoted to \u201cCandy Crush\u201d and pictures of an acquaintance\u2019s Spring Break. It also accidentally offered the average person a look at just how much they\u2019ve shared with the service over the years.<\/p>\n

Courtesy<\/strong>:<\/strong> http:\/\/pandodaily.com\/2013\/07\/08\/connecting-the-dots-facebook-shows-the-world-how-much-it-knows-about-them\/[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row]<\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]You\u2019ve gotta give Facebook credit for its relentless drive to harvest and exploit the data of its billion users. Facebook knows where you are, where you\u2019re from, the places you Like, the people you know, and what you\u2019re interested in \u2014 as soon as it makes its way to wearable computers it\u2019ll probably know when […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":2307,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[98,13,10,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-679","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured-posts","category-search-engine-marketing","category-search-engine-optimization","category-social-networking"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nispaara.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/679","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nispaara.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nispaara.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nispaara.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nispaara.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=679"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.nispaara.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/679\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2770,"href":"https:\/\/www.nispaara.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/679\/revisions\/2770"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nispaara.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nispaara.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nispaara.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nispaara.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}