Monday, April 09, 2018

The Future


What will Facebook look like in five years? 

I noticed this afternoon, that a friend has signed off of Facebook.  He described FB as a social experiment.  I have thought about bailing on FB, 95% of it is "sharing" of commercially produced content.  

Recently it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica gathered data on Facebook to target messages in the last election.  It is easy enough to read a public profile, they went beyond that posting quizzes and polls on FB and using the answers to create profiles on up to 50-million of FB users, so they could target political messages to FB users.  Yep, if you took one of those fun find out what famous person you are most like tests on FB, you were probably being profiled so targeted political messages could be shared with your FB account.  

People seem shocked by this - how silly.  Nothing you do online is PRIVATE. NOTHING!  Google scans my emails and uses that data to target advertising - no surprise.  When I post on Blogger, I am creating content for Google.  When you comment on my blog, Google and others are scanning your comments, connecting those back to your profile, and using that data to target advertising on blogger, on Facebook, on your local newspaper's website.  

I miss the good old days, when people posted pictures of their meals on FB, I miss the personal content.  We need more of it, or I will likely break that habit.  

4 comments:

  1. Never been on FB. I am on Instagram and that is all pictures. Since I'm very visual, I enjoy it....and it also gives me yet another place to store pictures and play with photo finishes since they have filtes which is cool.

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  2. never had nor never will have a facebork account; what I have seen of it is stupid - the same damn cat pix/dos equis guy/willie wonka pix. B-O-R-I-N-G!

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  3. I would be happy to leave Facebook except that right now it’s how word gets out to friends and family that I have a new blog post. As for personal data, it’s everywhere.

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  4. A colleague of mine announced today that he's leaving FB. He realized he (and all users) were been turned into commodities. FB is a primary way I keep in touch with distant friends. I like that. I don't like much anything else about it. Maybe we should go back to good old email...

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