A late Friday topic -- Last week a developer friend of mine (he's in the Java world) convinced me to join Facebook as hew reckons it's a convenient way of keeping touch with real friends and organising social events (it's also popular with businesses). I can see he's right, and I'm reasonably impressed by the facilities it offers and it feels convenient and friendly to use. I like being able to hide 'junk' that clutters up your home page.
I've been hearing for years about how Facebook has questionable ethics about its data mining. Now I can see clearly what's going on. First of all, because I listed my hobbies and age, I notice that the ads on the right are perfectly targeted to me. For example, ads for telescopes and binoculars are appearing, probably because I listed my membership in the Vic Astro society. Other ads target my specific age and region. Fair enough I suppose, but what creeps me out is the people it's offering as potential friends. I'm getting friend suggestions for distant family members, old work colleagues and people who are in similar clubs with me and have similar hobbies. A local musician popped-up as an offer, and I eventually realised that his name appears in the caption on a single group photo from a social event listed deep in my personal web site. My site is listed in Facebook, so I can therefore figure out that Facebook has trawled through every word in my site looking for names/keywords that match existing accounts in Facebook to offer them as friends. Fair enough I suppose, since the whole idea of these sorts of sites is to make money, I guess I'd do the same thing. But now the security dangers and ethical problems become obvious. If they're not doing this already, I imagine you could search the whole of Facebook looking for things like popular toys, books, music, political issues, etc and derive trends and stats upon how often they are mentioned by different age groups. This sort of information could be priceless. The technical aspects of this data trawling, parsing and collation would be fascinating. Oh well, I suppose this is just a symptom of the new money-grubbing globalised century we live in. Greg
