Facebook: the all-seeing eye?
A Facebook user and journalist, Kashmir Hill, sees a person with a family name that sounds familiar in one of the recommendations that Facebook insists she make on her list of “People you may know”, and after contacting the person, realizes she is the woman who is married to the brother of his biological grandfather, who she never met and with whom she does not share her last name because she abandoned his father when he was a child. For reasons he doesn’t understand, Facebook seemed to know her family tree better than herself, and had been able to establish a relationship even though, after being adopted, her father took a completely different surname, and neither he nor the people who later came to know his biological family (on the occasion of his mother’s funeral) used Facebook.
What does Facebook really know about its users? In addition to the large amount of data we voluntarily share with the company, either explicitly when we register or fill in aspects of our profile, or implicitly during the more than fifty minutes a day that, on average, we spend there, it turns out that the company invests significant amounts of money in the acquisition of external databases and brokers that reflect what we get up to outside the internet, through agreements with data providers such as the one it has since 2012 with Datalogix, the leading company in the analysis of consumer data through loyalty programs and other sources. This data is really the company’s source of business, both thanks to the publicity we receive when we use its network, or when we are on other pages.
What can be seen in the analysis of our networks by an organization that can see almost everything we do, including our behavior on and off line? This includes, where we are or where we are going, depending on the location of our phone, or even “minor details” such as those fleeting moments of curiosity when we wonder what ever happened to an old school friend of lover.
A brief look at the list of people Facebook tells us we might know always comes up with something interesting, which we are usually able to explain in terms of the number of shared contacts or because we belong to the same group or we are named in the same photograph, the networks we belong to (the college or university we study at, the companies where we work, etc.). But the reality is that the Facebook algorithm, about which the company will say nothing, because it considers it part of its competitive advantage, uses a hundred variables to obtain that list of people we may know and whose function is to give us access to bigger networks because, according to their research, people with bigger networks tend to be more loyal to Facebook.
What does Facebook know about us? Have you come across strange things that you cannot explain how Facebook came to know about you? Kashmir Hill is looking for just such information, and asking people to contribute, anonymously, if they prefer, so that I can apply a bit of reverse engineering to understand what kind of data the company is using to make its recommendations. Is Facebook close to becoming the all-seeing eye?
(En español, aquí)
