6 private links
This study compares the accuracy of human and computer-based personality judgments, using a sample of 86,220 volunteers who completed a 100-item personality questionnaire. We show that (i) computer predictions based on a generic digital footprint (Facebook Likes) are more accurate (r = 0.56) than those made by the participants’ Facebook friends using a personality questionnaire (r = 0.49
Psychologist Michal Kosinski developed a method of analyzing people’s behavior down to the minutest detail by looking at their Facebook activity—did a similar tool help propel Donald Trump to victory?
It was only a matter of time before Facebook Messenger would start testing ads, after rumors of its plans to do so leaked nearly a year ago. Earlier today, it announced that users in Australia and Thailand will begin seeing sponsored content in the coming weeks, with the experiment being labeled as a way "for people and brands to engage on Messenger." What this means, really, is that you and your friends should expect to see targeted ads in the app soon -- which won't be hard to miss, judging by the image above.
Facebook wants you and me to spend as much time as possible within Facebook. So they’ve made deals to bring as much content as possible to Facebook, rather than to distribute Facebook’s connective tissue throughout the web. Only one of those approaches would have made the world more open. But the one they’ve chosen simply rebuilds the world within Facebook. They are re-making the world within their walls, and closing it off to anyone without a username and password. That’s their prerogative — and really, there’s nothing particularly wrong with that, hubris notwithstanding — but it’s not what they say they’re doing. They are not making the world more open.
Facebook, Google+ and Twitter supply official sharing code snippets which quietly siphon personal data from all page visitors. Shariff enables visitors to see how popular your page is on Facebook and share your content with others without needless data leaks.
Shariff (/ˈʃɛɹɪf/) is an open-source, low-maintenance, high-privacy solution maintained by German computer magazine c't and heise online.
This script will delete any items in your Facebook news feed that are "sponsored" or "suggested" (meaning an advertisement). It will continue to weed out these posts as you scroll, removing them before they appear.
The simple way to completely avoid this is to refuse to have a Facebook page. However, a compromise may be possible, one which attracts public support while not boosting Facebook's power much. This article proposes such a compromise.
Facebook is a surveillance engine, accumulating lots of personal data which is also available to the state. For your privacy and freedom's sake, it is important not to have an active Facebook account; refusing blocks Facebook's main channel for collecting information about you and, through you, about your friends and relatives. (Whatsapp, a subsidiary of Facebook, is also important to avoid.) Explaining to them why you firmly insist on routing your communications with them through some other system will strengthen your will power to resist systems that use you to harm you and others.
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The simple way to completely avoid this is to refuse to have a Facebook page. However, a compromise may be possible, one which attracts public support while not boosting Facebook's power much. This article proposes such a compromise.
For several years, a data firm eventually hired by the Trump campaign, Cambridge Analytica, has been using Facebook as a tool to build psychological profiles that represent some 230 million adult Americans. A spinoff of a British consulting company and sometime-defense contractor known for its counterterrorism “psy ops” work in Afghanistan, the firm does so by seeding the social network with personality quizzes. Respondents — by now hundreds of thousands of us, mostly female and mostly young but enough male and older for the firm to make inferences about others with similar behaviors and demographics — get a free look at their Ocean scores. Cambridge Analytica also gets a look at their scores and, thanks to Facebook, gains access to their profiles and real names.
I was surprised to see the Facebook SDK being loaded in the network tab on my blog when I don't have any Facebook buttons. It turned out to be coming courtesy of Disqus. No wonder Facebook knows everywhere you go!
Belgian security researcher Inti De Ceukelaire claims he discoved a method to figure out the phone numbers associated with many Facebook accounts, even when these phone number are not set
Facebook claims that no one can intercept WhatsApp messages, not even the company and its staff, ensuring privacy for its billion-plus users. But new research shows that the company could in fact read messages due to the way WhatsApp has implemented its end-to-end encryption protocol.
Since 2012, Facebook has been working with data brokers to acquire even more information on its users. According to a report from ProPublica, this information can include a user’s income, restaurant habits, and credit card activities.
Combine third party data with what Facebook already knows about its users from using the social network and it is hard to think of any piece of information the company doesn’t have about a person.
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People regularly ask how Facebook, with its massive data management costs, can offer its service for free. The answer is simple, the product is you.
show-facebook-computer-vision-tags - A very simple Chrome Extension that displays the automated image tags that Facebook has generated for your images
Find out what data Facebook stores about you. Join us in our fight for a social network that respects our right to privacy.
Class-action lawsuits target the biometric privacy policies of several Internet giants
Social media giant Facebook has confessed to giving the personal details of thousands of its users to the British government this year.
Google recently announced that it would start including individual users' names and photos in some ads. This means that if you rate some product positively, your friends may see ads for that product with your name and photo attached -- without your knowledge or consent. Meanwhile, Facebook is eliminating a feature that allowed people to retain some portions of their anonymity on its website.
These changes come on the heels of Google's move to explore replacing tracking cookies with something that users have even less control over. Microsoft is doing something similar by developing its own tracking technology.
Since Donald Trump's election, many in the tech industry have been concerned about the way their skills—and the data collected by their employers—might be used. On a number of occasions, Trump has expressed the desire to perform mass deportations and end any and all Muslim immigration. He has also said that it would be "good management" to create a database of Muslims, and that there should be "a lot of systems" to track Muslims within the US.