Facebook's Future Plans for Data Collection Beyond All Imagination

I just found this article this morning. It relates to a recent patent filed by Facebook and is further proof of just why I refuse to use any Social Media. Life is getting crazy when Google and Facebook know more about you than you do!

On November 12 Facebook, Inc. filed its 178th patent application for a consumer profiling technique the company calls “inferring household income for users of a social networking system.”

“The amount of information gathered from users,” explain Facebook programmers Justin Voskuhl and Ramesh Vyaghrapuri in their patent application, “is staggering — information describing recent moves to a new city, graduations, births, engagements, marriages, and the like.” Facebook and other so-called tech companies have been warehousing all of this information since their respective inceptions. In Facebook’s case, its data vault includes information posted as early as 2004, when the site first went live. Now in a single month the amount of information forever recorded by Facebook —dinner plans, vacation destinations, emotional states, sexual activity, political views, etc.— far surpasses what was recorded during the company’s first several years of operation. And while no one outside of the company knows for certain, it is believed that Facebook has amassed one of the widest and deepest databases in history. Facebook has over 1,189,000,000 “monthly active users” around the world as of October 2013, providing considerable width of data. And Facebook has stored away trillions and trillions of missives and images, and logged other data about the lives of this billion plus statistical sample of humanity. Adjusting for bogus or duplicate accounts it all adds up to about 1/7th of humanity from which some kind of data has been recorded.

Link to Story

So do you still have a Facebook account? The time is coming when the amount of knowledge about what you where doing and where you were will exceed your own memory. While this may not seem like that big of a deal imagine this:

You are falsely accused of Rape. You are on trial and the prosecuting attorney asks where you were on December 5th 2011 at 4:00pm. Since your memory is imperfect you give them a wrong answer. That's when they show the jury your Facebook trail. Toss in your cell phone records and browsing and poof you are automatically a liar and your credibility is called into question.

This is far scarier than simple "advertising".

Saw it coming long ago .. never had .. never will have farcebook or any such sites like it.

reply to post by Mamatus


Got rid of mine over a year ago, when they were coming out with another tracking scam, they just don't stop do they?

They want to watch you sleep, eat, paint your nails whatever. I will not allow a facebook account to be opened in my house ever again.

reply to post by Mamatus


Do you folks understand yet why the government didn't crack down on those innocuous "cookies" that started all of this business back in the 1990s? (Actually, they were probably doing it first.)

Here, we have private enterprise, with its own big bucks, collecting data that a controlling government would kill for. And if you think big business doesn't work hand-in-glove with government...well, maybe you are better off not having such thoughts. So don't think about Monsanto, GE, etc.

You may tend to think that you do nothing wrong and that they would have no reason to "come and get you." That would be correct, but that is an all-or-nothing extreme position on the situation. Better to think as the thread mentions, that with direct facts about your life and doings, or with elaborate algorithms concerning those facts that they can virtually open you life to various kinds of influences. The possibilities are enormous. What is at stake is what we yet retain of free will.

reply to post by Mamatus


Got rid of mine a few years ago. Even when I had an account it was under an alias with no real personal information linked to it. Never did trust them.

i have never had a social network account , but i have perused through relatives before for shats and giggles , and am pretty sure half of the crap on there is complete lies and / or exaggerations . i doubt there little patents will do any good . its kind of like the data mining that the feds were doing , that lead to a bunch of people i know , and perhaps many more , subscribing to email alerts and stuff that we had no interest in what so ever. while there is no benefit to these actions , it gives more useless info for them to sort through , and makes profiling just a little more difficult.

reply to post by Mamatus


first, when you're asked a question under such circumstances, it's up to you to clearly state that you're not certain about it - if you'll decide to say something as 100% truth when you're not sure about it, you can blame yourself for that.

second, it's up to you to decide what kind of info you share on facebook or any other website. cellphones are a different matter, but then your location can be checked wether or not you were using any social media or the internet at all if you didn't disable your cellphone (and probably remove its battery).

wanna stay off the grid? throw out your cellphone, stop using the internet, leave the city.
otherwise, stop the fearmongering, because such ambitions of corporations like facebook and google are hardly anything new, and are far less sinister in their nature than what your own government is doing since many years.

It is truly scary what is now known about how data is gathered and used. It is only a matter of time before police departments have open access (hopefully with a warrant) to peoples lives and alibi's.

I can hear the knock at the door now:

This is the police, open the door we have a warrant for your arrest.
What did I do? You posted something hateful on Facebook, that is a crime and you are to remanded to a re-education center.

Oh wait that is already happening......

reply to post by brandiwine14


they don't tell people what they should discuss. if the society would use websites like facebook and twitter to discuss mostly important matters, it would be a different game altogether.

but no, people prefer to share their private life details, including the time when they went to pee for the last time, and you blame facebook for that?

how about blaming human stupidity?

reply to post by jedi_hamster


This is not fear mongering. I am not into that. This is simple education. People should be very aware of what is happening with their information.

I got in a non injury fender bender and the crazy wench tried to sue me for 300k. The plaintiff's attorney wanted 30 days of my cell phone records. My attorney had to fight to only give them the hour before and an hour after the accident.

What if he had gotten 30 days worth?
Would he have used the knowledge of my having an extra-marital affair to question my honesty?
Would he have seen the pic of the tasty bud my buddy just grew and sent over without my permission?
Would he have used the "he was still impaired from last nights late party" to make it worse?
(those above examples are fictional)
YOU BET!

This is education. This is not letting people forget the grip that technology has on our lives. Fear mongering is getting bent over ISON hitting the Earth.

reply to post by Mamatus


hate speech should be a crime regardless of the way it spreads. but lemme guess, you're one of those that demand 'anonymity' on the internet, so you can do whatever you want online, regardless if you would be charged for doing the same thing in public or not?

good luck with that.

reply to post by jedi_hamster

I do not blame Facebook for human stupidity. Saying that was silly of you at best. I never made such a claim.

Knowledge is power and people really need to see just how much power they are giving to a stupid thing like Facebook.

Mamatus
reply to post by jedi_hamster

 

I do not blame Facebook for human stupidity. Saying that was silly of you at best. I never made such a claim.

Knowledge is power and people really need to see just how much power they are giving to a stupid thing like Facebook.

that wasn't a reply to your post.
guess who's reply looks silly now.

reply to post by Mamatus


and what that has to do with facebook?
the answer: everything and nothing. you would be screwed in the exact same way regardless of using the internet at all or not.

my comment about going off the grid stands.

This is the reason such a site is given such a high monetary value and the owners are getting rich. it has no other value for profit.

Couldn't any site do the same thing? Look at Amazon or Etsy..I'm sure a reasonably smart person could come up with the same information by looking at what a person looks at, shops for, buys or favorites. Pinterest, Tumblr, Flickr, IG, Google + all of them..anything you buy, search for, log-on to, subscribe to, email or buy through Paypal is...im sure recorded somehow..or in some fashion. If you don't want to be 'tracked' you would have to stay off line completely and not receive any mail or buy anything from anyone. Which is pretty unreasonable.

I don't know....I think it's just too late...I don't really want to go all paranoid.

It's a scary thing when the internet knows your secrets before you do! I've always been a part of some sort of social media site, but after reading that, I wonder if we should all be a little more cautious. I've been lucky in that my accounts have always been secure, but now I'm not so sure. Is it wise to be using social media in this day an age, when nothing is really safe or private anymore? I mean, really, what is a private life nowadays? When the internet knows more information about you than you do, it's time to start worrying, which now means changing those privacy settings once again and hoping that it works this time round or it will be goodbye to social networks and hello to a private life again. Sounds quiet appealing, actually.

reply to post by Mamatus


I lie all the time on facebook. That might mess up their plans.

If they want to collect info on my boring life and see what i had for dinner etc then they can crack on. I have nothing to hide. You have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide, its simple really.


King

Sorry for the laziness, but i'm going quote a previuvs post, right before bed and all,

the Government would provide the MASSIVE data dumps they have from Echelon, See the internet was built with Echelon integrated, so ANYTHING and EVERYTHING you do on the internet is intercepted and downloaded on a Data dump, currently however as with Google data, then its all useless, until they get the system to sort through it up and running.

But remember, the internet was a state sponsored affair, Echelon is a integrated part of the internet, everything you do on the Governments world wide web is monitored,

Source post/thread ( What Google Knows About YOU! Its Scarier Than I thought! )

So you are monitored and all you're online movement is stored regardless, its just useless bits of data atm though.

Namaste.