"Fake news" seems to mean different things to different people. What do you mean by it? That it's not important? That it's just entertainment? That it's false? That it's propaganda? That the person posting it here is doing so for some nefarious reason? Something else?
In this case at least, they're going from a peak of ~1.66 posts/day to a valley of ~1.54. As an aggregate that looks like a compelling pattern, but consider it on an individual level: we're talking about one post every ten days. Initially looking at the graph made me think the difference was way greater than a post every ten days, so I'd agree with the GP that it is misleading; I was mislead.
Looking at the graph, it seems like we're talking about ~16.5 posts in the ten days before a relationship versions versus ~15.7 in the ten days after. In the context of an individual, Facebook might be able to combine this with a bunch of other data to make guesses about people entering relationships, but a quick look at the graph makes it look like they could do it from just this one piece of data.
FWIW, I think people are often too quick to dismiss graphs as misleading due to the y-scale and I do think the graph is interesting. That said, I think a lot depends on the context, and being directly below "When You [emphasis added] Fall in Love, This Is What Facebook Sees" makes this seem misleading.
They admit looking at those as well, in the original post they posted on Facebook[1]:
"Relationships start with a period of courtship: on Facebook, messages are exchanged, profiles are visited, posts are shared on each other's timelines."
They didn't produce any graphs of the amount of messages exchanged though.
Imagine the firms that would fail if all the pretext and games of dating and sex went away. How many less exotic and luxury cars would be sold? Designer clothes, body spray, make-up, hunks of carbon attached to gold bands? Culture would be dramatically different.
I've been wondering what our society will look like once androids look and act comparable to humans. The prevalence of online porn has likely changed social norms drastically in ways I can't imagine, but I'd guess realistic androids even more so.
This is from 2014. I'm not sure whether that is a selection bias, but very few of my friends "share timeline posts" with their partners (or future partners, or anyone really) nowadays.
I think they just worded it poorly, but what I think they mean is just any posts that involve both people. So this would include photos where both people are tagged, mentioning the other person, posting on the other person's wall, and things like that.
When I see posts like these, they creep me out. Another reminder that Facebook and all other online services, ad companies know way too much about their users and can deduce more information about you (in truly creative ways) than you imagined would be possible.
When I show these posts to people who resemble the average internet user, they just don't care. This is something that is saddening and baffling for me. I think it's just that most people don't understand why this is an issue to begin with and people need to be made aware of what is going on. The easiest way to start would be to discuss privacy issues with your closest family and friends.
"When someone wants to do X they start showing pattern A" is bad enough, but "when you show someone pattern A, they will be 30% more likely to want to do X" is the true disaster. And it is going to happen [more often].
Well the source is really me being snarky, but there is this http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2423713/Faceb... which as the source of any authoritative figure would be laughable given the small sample size, but maybe something to build on.
Why should I care? For most of human history, most people lived in villages. Everyone they met would know this kind of information about them ("it's obvious to everyone except the couple themselves that x and y are into each other" is a literary trope for a reason). People survived, thrived even - in fact there's a strong argument our psychological welfare was much better in those conditions than it is in anonymous cities.
People wouldn't mind as much if they had the same kinds and amounts of data on the their observers as their observers have on them.
I kind of work in this field, and it's easy to know a lot more about a stranger than they know about themselves. Given the law of large numbers, I can make lots of accurate predictions of a person's future behavior, and I'm not amazingly smart. I'm also careful to not spy on people because that's just creepy. But, I'm certain that there are people out there using similar types of data who are 1) way smarter than me, 2) creepy, and 3) devious.
(BTW, the data that I use has all PII removed, but it's trivial to identify individuals, if one is motivated)
> Everyone they met would know this kind of information about them
Everyone in the village would have had detailed spending habits, knowledge of every website browsed, media preferences, political views, porn habits, location history and more all backed up in giant databases that are easily search-able?
Spending Habits: Yes - you could easily observe what your village neighbors are buying.
Websites Browsed/Media Prefs/Porn Habits: No, these things didnt exist for most of human history. I guess "Media Preferences" would be known if we're talking books vs. newspaper.
Political views: Yes, assuming the person isn't a hermit.
Location History: Yes, presumably you'd know where village-mates are/have been.
Backed up in a database that's easily searchable? I guess that depends on how good your brain is at remembering things.
Not trying to nitpick too hard, but all your viable examples listed are in fact things your fellow villagers would know about you in a close-knit community.
Yeah, you might have a rough idea of spending habits for a handful of people, but not everyone, and not to the same detail.
Books/newspapers/etc sure, you'd know some of it, but you wouldn't have a record of what they consumed in their home unless they told you.
You might know some of their political views, but only the ones they share openly.
If a co-villager wandered off for a week, you wouldn't likely have any idea where they went. You'd have to rely on what they told you, and where others said they went, which isn't necessarily accurate. Additionally, you wouldn't get the level of detail FB can.
No brain is capable of storing even half of the location that FB's DB can. I don't care how good someone's memory is.
They would know some of the above sure, but it'd be at a high level, and not nearly as accurate.
You make some good points, but i have to slightly disagree with some of them :)
"Yeah, you might have a rough idea of spending habits for a handful of people, but not everyone, and not to the same detail."
The shopkeeper does. And as someone who grew up in a small town, the gossip is real.
"ou might know some of their political views, but only the ones they share openly"
Facebook doesnt know my political views? Though I dont openly share them on fb. More to avoid flamewars.
"If a co-villager wandered off for a week, you wouldn't likely have any idea where they went"
Depends how well you know them. You might know they like that spot by the lake for example. And if I leave my phone at home, no one would know where I went.(which sounds like a good reason to carry my phone, safety)
There's a big difference between your neighbours knowing all your secrets, and Facebook knowing all your secrets. And I think which you find worse says something about you.
People who care more about what the neighbours think, might consider the village having access to all their behaviour a bigger problem than some distant, faceless corporation.
For people who care about power imbalance, a single corporation knowing everything about everybody is much more serious than people in villages knowing about their neighbours.
Coming from a small city in the country, I can tell you this is exactly reason #1 why people leave the small village for the anonymous big city: privacy.
BTW people are often wrong on their assumptions, data is usually not.
* The Stasi were terrifying enough in a non-networked age - with smartphones, facebook, etc. they'll have so much more data on us.
* IMHO the political climate we live in could easily produce another Stasi within a generation.
* If that we get something like that again they'll have a decade or more information on you, and information you are leaking right now could be used to coerce, blackmail and threaten you.
Does accuracy of information really make a difference there? The Stasi were terrifying because they had no accountability - you could be taken away in the middle of the night on a whim, or because a disgruntled neighbour had accused you of treason. A Stasi who had accurate information about who was opposing the state would in some ways have been less terrible.
I grew up in a community legally titled "village" (<400 people at the time); digging into your neighbors lives for any topic was highly frowned upon.
It's almost as if social norms have changed since the days of tight knit hunter-gathering, wicker shanty peoples roamed the Earth.
Shocking.
In a country where having the "wrong bumper sticker" gets people driven off the road, or riding my bicycle nearly sees me pushed into parked cars by folks driving lifted Dodge Rams, your ideas make little sense.
The difference is that in the village case, the information distribution was much more symmetric. People knew about you and you knew about them, and you knew about each other's knowledge and presumably acted accordingly. So for instance, if being gay was going to be a problem in your village, you hid it well.
With Facebook, they have all the information about you, and you don't even know what they know about you. So in the best case scenario, you are hoping that they are going to be a "benevolent dictator" with their asymmetric knowledge, and not exploit you.
I don't understand why Facebook always gets 100% of the blame in cases like these. Don't get me wrong, I get the concern, but what happened to the old adage of "if you don't want something on the internet, don't put it there"? Are people never responsible for what they voluntarily share on Facebook? Whenever we put the blame on Facebook for the data they collect, aren't we just saying people can't be trusted to protect their own privacy on the internet? And if yes, shouldn't we change the conversation to how to educate people better on the dangers of the internet, rather bashing Facebook?
As far as facebook, I don't use their apps and when accessing through a browser don't let the browser share my location. I may have to consider accessing FB through an anonymous vpn service at some point...
For example when a parent post a picture of their newborn baby and continues over the years, for example pictures of their sports events and training, movies of choir presentations and whatnot until the child is savy enough to use Facebook themselves. Don't those people deserve privacy too?
What about significant others that maybe don't even have an account, but have their counterpart share their shared stories and media?
Because Facebook actively encourages people to post more than what is necessary, or even a good idea. It's to Facebook's advantage that most people don't understand the depth of data being collected or the possible consequences of oversharing, so they do everything in their power short of outright deception to get people to post more.
Of course, not 100% of the blame lies directly with Facebook since they're not actively holding guns to people's heads forcing them to use the service, but I see it as more akin to predatory lending where the business profits by exploiting their customers.
The way I see it, it's kinda like a bank, yeah sure my bank has enormous control over me, and can on a whim ruin me with my financial, purchase info and control over my assets. But they have a very, very strong incentive not to do so, because doing so would cause them to lose lots and lots of money.
Similarly facebook could abuse our information, but they stand to lose a lot if they do. Either way, this is the future and there really isn't much we can do about it. Businesses are going to track us, and save going off grid and living in the woods, I don't think there's any real escape.
True, but is it regulations that keep the bank from stealing your money and using your financial transactions against you - or is it the prospect of losing billions through loss of customer trust. I would guess it's the later because banking regulations are fairly toothless and bank lobbies are extremely strong.
I would say both. The MERS[0] registry could not be set up because the banks thought it is sort-of-gray legally, and they would be able to work it. Then, it turned out that it is actually against black letter law, so we had the robosigning scandal, which they somehow managed to weather unscathed.
Banks have foreclosed on wrong houses etc, and didn't suffer (enough) for it from either the hand of the law or the hands of customers, so they don't care (enough) to make sure they're doing it properly.
I believe you're mistaken. Look into the "wildcat banking" era in the US for numerous examples of banks stealing or defrauding customers when there were no federal regulations on banks.
Yea, I would be much more worried about smaller companies that gets more information about you than Facebook or google. Like a lot of "free" browser plugins.
There was a talk at 33c3 about just that(Build your own NSA).
What if FB gets hacked, and lose your data? Or a government requires them to hand it over? It doesn't have to be malicious. Additionally, what if they were going under and wanted to sell your data to help compensate for that. Do you really think they'd put your privacy above their profit?
So facebook, which needs us to spend as much time on the website as possible to maintain advertising revenue, has the perverse incentive of keeping everyone single. So this could be the answer to the Fermi Paradox
You seem to be mis-interpreting.. or inferring data that is not there.
All this is showing is that prior to being in a relationship there is a lot of online activity between two people, and less after being in a relationship. Presumably because prior to being in a relationship, you are spending more time communicating at a distance, and when in a relationship you tend to spend more of your time physically together rather than communicating online.
This data says nothing about how much these people are using the website in general.
We've banned this account and numerous others for serial trolling. Please stop creating accounts to violate the HN guidelines with.
In addition to the problem with posting uncivil and/or unsubstantive comments, it's not ok to create large batches of accounts for a comment or two each. This is a community, and users here should have some consistent identity for each other to relate to. Otherwise we might as well have no usernames at all, which would be a very different site. (Anonymity is of course fine.)
Each of the data points is an average of many users (and potentially have huge errorbars they do not show). Therefore for single individuals, this result may not be very predictive.
In fact, given that the distribution of number of posts likely follows power law, the average is hugely influenced by a small number of heavy facebook users. I would say this figure summaries more about top facebook users rather than the majority of users. So when "you" (an average facebook user) fall in love, this is probably not what facebook sees.
Somewhat related, my son showed me a program from Britain called "Black Mirror" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mirror) The shows are an hour or so long, and it's not a series with a long-running plot, but each episode is separate (à la The Twilight Zone). We watched one called "Nosedive" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosedive), which was set in a future dystopia where everybody was socially rated and that rating was visible to others. Remember the almost-startup from last year, Peeple.com? Yikes!
Given the dubious statistical significance and the fact that predicting who's "courting" each other is really pretty easy, this article seems like a "the suit is back" adverticle for Facebook, touting its predictive abilities to advertisers like Jared, Netflix, Bed Bath & Beyond etc.
It sounds like Facebook has a vested interest in keeping people single and to break up existing couples.
I do think that relationships these days are more fleeting than they used to be. I think that Facebook (Instagram, particularly) tends to encourage this type of behaviour.
Constantly being exposed to other couples' luxurious lifestyles and holiday trips is not particularly good for relationships (particularly new relationships).
I do think that most people these days tend to value earning potential and physical appearance far more than personality when it comes to finding a match and I think that social media is probably responsible for much of this.
I care about earning potential and physical appearance. Why shouldn't I? I also happen to care about many other things in a potential relationship but those things you mentioned are definitely high up there for me.
Who are you to tell me what value system I should have? All of this is independent of social media, by the way.
I think I'd like to see a law that requires all companies to share all information they have on you in an easily understandable format. I think that'd be a great start.
Any saved derived information, like what kind of person they think you are, or what they think you'd be likely to buy, must also be shared.
Basically a dump of all their databases under your user ID.
I'm surprised Facebook hasn't specifically monetized this type of behavior. It seems to me that this is a very clear signal of intent and can be monetized.
I'm curious to know if this type of data could be used to track infidelity. I'm thinking further than domestic trouble and more towards blackmail, espionage, etc. I can see how this type of information could be useful for the wrong reasons.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] threadFWIW, I think people are often too quick to dismiss graphs as misleading due to the y-scale and I do think the graph is interesting. That said, I think a lot depends on the context, and being directly below "When You [emphasis added] Fall in Love, This Is What Facebook Sees" makes this seem misleading.
"Relationships start with a period of courtship: on Facebook, messages are exchanged, profiles are visited, posts are shared on each other's timelines."
They didn't produce any graphs of the amount of messages exchanged though.
[1] https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-data-science/the-for...
Facebook / CIA / NSA - big no thanks!
When I show these posts to people who resemble the average internet user, they just don't care. This is something that is saddening and baffling for me. I think it's just that most people don't understand why this is an issue to begin with and people need to be made aware of what is going on. The easiest way to start would be to discuss privacy issues with your closest family and friends.
Worth mentioning RMS' blog post: https://stallman.org/facebook.html
I kind of work in this field, and it's easy to know a lot more about a stranger than they know about themselves. Given the law of large numbers, I can make lots of accurate predictions of a person's future behavior, and I'm not amazingly smart. I'm also careful to not spy on people because that's just creepy. But, I'm certain that there are people out there using similar types of data who are 1) way smarter than me, 2) creepy, and 3) devious.
(BTW, the data that I use has all PII removed, but it's trivial to identify individuals, if one is motivated)
It is really easy to identify a majority of users of such a dataset.
Everyone in the village would have had detailed spending habits, knowledge of every website browsed, media preferences, political views, porn habits, location history and more all backed up in giant databases that are easily search-able?
Websites Browsed/Media Prefs/Porn Habits: No, these things didnt exist for most of human history. I guess "Media Preferences" would be known if we're talking books vs. newspaper.
Political views: Yes, assuming the person isn't a hermit.
Location History: Yes, presumably you'd know where village-mates are/have been.
Backed up in a database that's easily searchable? I guess that depends on how good your brain is at remembering things.
Not trying to nitpick too hard, but all your viable examples listed are in fact things your fellow villagers would know about you in a close-knit community.
Yeah, you might have a rough idea of spending habits for a handful of people, but not everyone, and not to the same detail.
Books/newspapers/etc sure, you'd know some of it, but you wouldn't have a record of what they consumed in their home unless they told you.
You might know some of their political views, but only the ones they share openly.
If a co-villager wandered off for a week, you wouldn't likely have any idea where they went. You'd have to rely on what they told you, and where others said they went, which isn't necessarily accurate. Additionally, you wouldn't get the level of detail FB can.
No brain is capable of storing even half of the location that FB's DB can. I don't care how good someone's memory is.
They would know some of the above sure, but it'd be at a high level, and not nearly as accurate.
"Yeah, you might have a rough idea of spending habits for a handful of people, but not everyone, and not to the same detail."
The shopkeeper does. And as someone who grew up in a small town, the gossip is real.
"ou might know some of their political views, but only the ones they share openly"
Facebook doesnt know my political views? Though I dont openly share them on fb. More to avoid flamewars.
"If a co-villager wandered off for a week, you wouldn't likely have any idea where they went"
Depends how well you know them. You might know they like that spot by the lake for example. And if I leave my phone at home, no one would know where I went.(which sounds like a good reason to carry my phone, safety)
People who care more about what the neighbours think, might consider the village having access to all their behaviour a bigger problem than some distant, faceless corporation.
For people who care about power imbalance, a single corporation knowing everything about everybody is much more serious than people in villages knowing about their neighbours.
* IMHO the political climate we live in could easily produce another Stasi within a generation.
* If that we get something like that again they'll have a decade or more information on you, and information you are leaking right now could be used to coerce, blackmail and threaten you.
[& p.s. your anonymity and privacy shot up as soon as you stepped away from your village.]
It's almost as if social norms have changed since the days of tight knit hunter-gathering, wicker shanty peoples roamed the Earth.
Shocking.
In a country where having the "wrong bumper sticker" gets people driven off the road, or riding my bicycle nearly sees me pushed into parked cars by folks driving lifted Dodge Rams, your ideas make little sense.
The difference is that in the village case, the information distribution was much more symmetric. People knew about you and you knew about them, and you knew about each other's knowledge and presumably acted accordingly. So for instance, if being gay was going to be a problem in your village, you hid it well.
With Facebook, they have all the information about you, and you don't even know what they know about you. So in the best case scenario, you are hoping that they are going to be a "benevolent dictator" with their asymmetric knowledge, and not exploit you.
As far as facebook, I don't use their apps and when accessing through a browser don't let the browser share my location. I may have to consider accessing FB through an anonymous vpn service at some point...
What about people that had no choice?
For example when a parent post a picture of their newborn baby and continues over the years, for example pictures of their sports events and training, movies of choir presentations and whatnot until the child is savy enough to use Facebook themselves. Don't those people deserve privacy too?
What about significant others that maybe don't even have an account, but have their counterpart share their shared stories and media?
Of course, not 100% of the blame lies directly with Facebook since they're not actively holding guns to people's heads forcing them to use the service, but I see it as more akin to predatory lending where the business profits by exploiting their customers.
Similarly facebook could abuse our information, but they stand to lose a lot if they do. Either way, this is the future and there really isn't much we can do about it. Businesses are going to track us, and save going off grid and living in the woods, I don't think there's any real escape.
Banks have foreclosed on wrong houses etc, and didn't suffer (enough) for it from either the hand of the law or the hands of customers, so they don't care (enough) to make sure they're doing it properly.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortgage_Electronic_Registrati...
There was a talk at 33c3 about just that(Build your own NSA).
https://www.facebook.com/data/posts/10152217010993415
small scale Y axis make it look quite large, but that doesn't seem a seismic shift.
Seems like a strange choice; most dating couples I know don't seem to set an anniversary date.
All this is showing is that prior to being in a relationship there is a lot of online activity between two people, and less after being in a relationship. Presumably because prior to being in a relationship, you are spending more time communicating at a distance, and when in a relationship you tend to spend more of your time physically together rather than communicating online.
This data says nothing about how much these people are using the website in general.
In addition to the problem with posting uncivil and/or unsubstantive comments, it's not ok to create large batches of accounts for a comment or two each. This is a community, and users here should have some consistent identity for each other to relate to. Otherwise we might as well have no usernames at all, which would be a very different site. (Anonymity is of course fine.)
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13284669 and marked it off-topic.
Each of the data points is an average of many users (and potentially have huge errorbars they do not show). Therefore for single individuals, this result may not be very predictive.
In fact, given that the distribution of number of posts likely follows power law, the average is hugely influenced by a small number of heavy facebook users. I would say this figure summaries more about top facebook users rather than the majority of users. So when "you" (an average facebook user) fall in love, this is probably not what facebook sees.
I do think that relationships these days are more fleeting than they used to be. I think that Facebook (Instagram, particularly) tends to encourage this type of behaviour.
Constantly being exposed to other couples' luxurious lifestyles and holiday trips is not particularly good for relationships (particularly new relationships).
I do think that most people these days tend to value earning potential and physical appearance far more than personality when it comes to finding a match and I think that social media is probably responsible for much of this.
Not really. Married couples (particularly those with a baby) are incredibly valuable advertising targets.
> I do think that most people these days tend to value earning potential and physical appearance far more than personality
There is absolutely nothing new about this.
Not new, but it's getting worse.
Who are you to tell me what value system I should have? All of this is independent of social media, by the way.
Any saved derived information, like what kind of person they think you are, or what they think you'd be likely to buy, must also be shared.
Basically a dump of all their databases under your user ID.