Apparently Presidential campaign coverage needed a fresh injection of dumb:
Most notably, the Facebook-Politico data set will include Facebook users’ private status messages and comments. While that may alarm some people, Facebook and Politico say the entire process is automated and no Facebook employees read the posts.
Rather, every post and comment — both public and private — by a U.S. user that mentions a presidential candidate’s name will be fed through a sentiment analysis tool that spits out anonymized measures of the general U.S. Facebook population.
In addition to the uselessness of this information, I have to laugh at the notion that privacy is insured because no Facebook employee is reading from the firehose of personal data being sent to Politico. That’s like your bank saying there’s no issue with sending your credit card info to the National Enquirer, because they’re not looking at it first.
MattF
I’ve pretty much avoided Facebook. (Pats self on head). Smart boy!
kdaug
I got your sentiment analysis tool right here.
schrodinger's cat
Isn’t what Facebook is doing unethical if not illegal? So far I have avoided Facebook like plague.
Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937
Will it use posts that contain ‘Mittens’ or ‘Romneybot2000’?
PeakVT
Politiho? Data? It is too laugh.
4tehlulz
Good luck Politico, I’m behind 7 proxies.
rlrr
Maybe someone can create a bunch of fake identities and create statuses like “Mitt Romney sucks Politico cock.”
scav
Tip of the fake data iceberg. Wouldn’t a Facebook-Proctor&Gamble dataset sent through the same Goldberg patented “sentiment analysis” be the dataset that launched a thousand MBA Powerpoint ships and make their little hearts go pita-pat?
RSA
From Facebook’s privacy policy:
My emphasis. A site that cared about privacy would have an and there. Legal implications aside, this policy allows Facebook to do anything they want with your data, as long as they tell you about it–and telling you about it might mean reading it in the news, as with this case. (That is, I haven’t seen any notice from Facebook about this.)
MattF
@RSA: I note that there are two “or”s in that final clause. Does this mean that they can leave personally identifying information as long as they remove your name?
Tone in DC
This is almost as bad as the damn Sony PS3 breach last year.
RSA
@MattF: Of course! For example, given what I know about data cleaning (which is probably more than average, but it’s still not much), I suspect that a lot of posts with the names “Ron” or “Paul” will remain in the data, even if they’re not about Ron Paul. Sorry, buddies–even if I do like you.
schrodinger's cat
Does Facebook also give data away, that can identify a person, to repressive regimes, like Syria or China or say Russia? Does Facebook help them track their dissidents?
Samara Morgan
hahaha
Assange was riiiight.
again.
;)
deep
I dunno, aggregate data like this doesn’t bother me that much. It’s like scientists lookin at a school of fish and observing that 197 fish swim to the left while 208 fish swim to the right. Yes, one fish might like pr0n, but who cares cuz it doesn’t effect the data regarding the entire school’s behavior.
kdaug
@schrodinger’s cat: IP addresses.
@Samara Morgan: Stick around, m_c. You make it fun.
Jerzy Russian
I hope the intelligence level of the general Facebook population is higher than it is in my small sample of “friends” (mostly people from high school whom I have never seen in over 25 years), or we are in trouble. Some of these people apparently have nothing else to do but spend all day online sharing the most mundane and idiotic details of their lives. And some genius at Politico thinks there is wisdom to be had here? Yet another example of why we cannot have nice things.
Southern Beale
So this is perfectly fine but remember: just last week we were told to be really, really upset that a government contractor was trolling Twitter and Facebook to capture peoples’ sentiment about things like whether we should try GITMO detainees in U.S. courts.
Similar to this deal, the individual users’ identity was kept secret. No one was telling the government: “Twitter user Southern Beale doesn’t like the Patriot Act” or whatever.
I really fail to see the difference.
What the takeaway from this should be is that neither the U.S. media nor the U.S. government seems able to get a handle on public opinion anymore. Now why is that? Is it because the issues are too complex to be summarized in a quick poll? Is it because the public dialogue has become too muddied by special interest groups who tend to shout over everyone else? Perhaps because our corporate media no longer effectively does its job?
Is there a reason people are turning to social media to get a handle on what people really think?
Inquiring minds …
PeakVT
@schrodinger’s cat: Repressive regimes don’t really need Fa$ebook’s help for any connections that are unencrypted. They can just snoop traffic to the site and pick out the user IDs.
Steve
That credit card analogy was so dumb it was painful to read. Politico is not being provided with the text of the posts, just the results of some kind of automated analysis.
Linda Featheringill
@Samara Morgan:
Assange was right about a number of things.
I signed up with Facebook so I could get access to the Occupy pages and follow them.My long-gone Mother signed up with Facebook in order to follow Occupy more closely.
Gin & Tonic
@schrodinger’s cat: Facebook doesn’t have to give that away. It’s already available to those regimes — it is well known that they’ve followed Facebook “friend” relationships to see who’s connected with whom on the dissident front.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
As someone who basically uses facebook these days to suggest articles for others to read, I can say this will be mostly useless. Most people on there are not there to discuss politics, it has just replaced the phone. It will show a concentration of people who are active, but because of self selection, the amount of statistical usefulness will be very limited.
MattF
OT, but– Is it really possible that Rick Perry is this stupid?:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2012_01/perrys_perception_of_war034794.php
13th Generation
Been trying to warn people about facebook for 3 years. At what point do people sit up and begin to take notice that they are giving away any semblance of privacy in their lives?
hueyplong
No intellectual bar can be set so low that Perry cannot limbo under it.
scav
and I’ve got a near library of data-privacy papers and books that date to the 90s and before. But, by all means loca, Assange is the prophet.
mistermix
@Steve: “every post and comment — both public and private — by a U.S. user that mentions a presidential candidate’s name will be fed through a sentiment analysis tool that spits out anonymized measures of the general U.S. Facebook population.”
Who’s running the sentiment analysis tool? Is it Facebook, Politico, or some third party? If it’s Facebook, how is such a tool built without a single Facebook employee looking at any of the private data? If it’s not Facebook, how does Facebook control the privacy of the data? And how do you know all this?
daryljfontaine
Once this sort of thing becomes commonplace, expect a metric sh1t-ton of fake profiles to extol the virtues of whoever the clown du jour is, bought and paid for by the SuperPAC of your choice. Although, to be fair, I wouldn’t expect most astroturf FBers to get the gawdawful spelling, grammar, and punctuation of the real anti-Obama set right, nor the sheer single-minded rabidity of the genuine Ron Paul people.
Pretty sure Twitter trending is already close to being co-opted by autoscripters. 140 characters isn’t hard to generate, retweeted by 50,000 additional bots to “generate consensus.”
D
Steve
@mistermix: You’re the one making the claim that Politico is being given access to the text of all the posts. Facebook and Politico claim that the results of the process are anonymized. As for the argument that maybe Facebook’s programmers looked at some trivial amount of private data in order to code the analytical program, words fail me.
You’re completely sensationalizing here. People who sensationalize often lash out at critics by saying “well, you can’t prove that the worst-case scenario isn’t true.” That’s hardly an excuse for asserting that scenario as fact. You said this is like giving out people’s credit card numbers!
Montysano
@13th Generation:
Precisely what privacy are you trying to protect? What kind of beer you like, or what type of shoes you prefer? Obviously I want to keep my financial information safe, but beyond that, I really don’t give a shit. Other than the odd spam email, what’s the downside? I’m old enough that the internet seems, every day, like a major fucking miracle, and a mostly free miracle at that. Facebook is a joy; I’ve reconnected with friends who I’d completely lost touch with. From where I sit, it’s all a win.
Southern Beale
Let me add, I harbor no delusions that social media is any more accurate a reflection of public opinion than any other easily-manipulated source. We’ve all seen those “get pay to comment on blog posts” ads conservative groups have run.
FormerSwingVoter
Heh. Facebook. How many privacy outrages can there be before people figure it out? Facebook’s entire business model is based explicitly around sharing your personal information. That is how they make money.
http://verydemotivational.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/demotivational-posters-facebook-you.jpg
gaz
@Tone in DC: At least sony apologized and gave us PS3 owners some free games.
Also, too: it was worse when gmail was hacked, IMO. I didn’t necessarily lose out on the PS3 network breach. When my gmail account was hacked (along with many others), my account was used to spam friends and associates. meh.
Southern Beale
@13th Generation:
Honey, that ship sailed long ago. When data mining became a big business so corporate America could assault you with advertising for just the right kind of laundry detergent its algorithms told it you wanted.
Please, this is the way it is now. Short of living off the grid and churning your own butter, there is no real privacy, not for anyone who wants to live and work in modern America. Swipe your debit card at the grocery store and a whole stream of information is harvested. There is no way to disappear anymore. I gave up on such quaint notions long ago.
That bell won’t be unrung.
Guest Rob
I don’t understand why this is a privacy outrage. The data will be anonymized before it is sent out – this generates trending info, it doesn’t reveal any personal information whatsoever. If you NEVER share your thoughts with another person in a public place because you’re worried about privacy, then you might have the tiniest iota of a legitimate complaint about this. Besides, by now EVERYBODY should know if you don’t want the world to know it, don’t put it on the internet. That’s a lesson most people learned in the ’90’s.
The greater concern is whether this gives validity to bad data. There is ample proof that the loudest voices often don’t speak for the majority.
Odie Hugh Manatee
This is why I will never join an online social network or even use my real name on the internet.
Fuck the data miners.
Gin & Tonic
@Montysano:
How about how much of it you like? Do you want your supermarket loyalty card info, showing how much beer you bought last year, or your debit card info showing how many bottles of bourbon you bought, being mined by your health insurer?
I know, that isn’t directly about FB. But have you spent any time with Google’s facial recognition? You know how good that is? Do you want, say, a potential employer mining FB to see that random photo of you at, say, an OWS demonstration? Sitting behind a pitcher of beer at the strip club?
mistermix
@Steve: “As for the argument that maybe Facebook’s programmers looked at some trivial amount of private data in order to code the analytical program, words fail me.”
Well, if it was just a “trivial” amount I take it all back. I guess Facebook’s claim that they looked at no data was just a noble lie on their part, perfectly justified in the circumstances. I was being sensationalistic to assume that an entity that trots out an obvious lie would tell other lies. I stand corrected.
BTW, can you please let the rest of us know exactly how much personal information is “trivial”, since you have an inside line into Facebook that the rest of us lack?
Hewer of Wood, Drawer of Water
@MattF: It appears that “Village Idiot” is an elected position in Texas
Dan
I’m kinda meh about this, though I’m curious about this program’s ability to recognize snark and sarcasm.
scav
@Guest Rob:
I can’t really think the technology / algorithms involved are any more sophisticated than the stuff they’re using to trawl through old text and pontificate about the changing use of certain concepts over time. Scrape off context, scrape off varying definitions, forget irony or sarcasm etc., build little word clouds or similar blah blah of deep import over time only at least with facebook, you’ve access to basic socio-economic breakdowns that you won’t have in twitter-generated text. Garbage In, Garbage Preformed, Garbage Out. No doubt it will be popular.
Michael Sheridan
While I’m certain the GOP campaign organization will be establishing as many fake profiles as possible to sing the praises of the remarkably life-like Willard Romney, it doesn’t mean we can’t also “freep” this particular poll ourselves.
Now that I know about this, I’ll be sure to include at least one anti-Romney status every day, with a “(and a big hello to our monitors at Politico!)” at the end.
chopper
@MattF:
yes, technically. it also means they can provide your name if they remove some other personally identifying information. of course, technicalities aside, they’d get ripped for that one.
chopper
@Dan:
a sarcasm detector, that’s a real useful invention.
General Stuck
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
Same here, except for using my real name General Stuck on blogs.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@General Stuck:
Let me guess, General is short for Generally? ;)
Redshift
I think this is a good thing to the extent that it reminds people that to Facebook, you are the product, not the customer.
4tehlulz
OT: HAHA Romney’s fucking stupid.
Paul in KY
@Odie Hugh Manatee: I wonder if there is a poor O.D. Manatee (first name Oscar, Middle name Delmus) somewhere who is bombarded daily with mailings & spam destined for you.
The Moar You Know
@Southern Beale: I got an email from Home Depot asking me to rate my purchase of some batteries I bought there last week using my debit card.
I felt like I was getting emails from a stalker: “so, Moar, how did you like that candy bar you ate five minutes ago? Was it good? Can I tell Hershey that? Hey, I know something else you’d like…”
This won’t end well for anyone.
Donut
@Steve:
You know this how…?
catclub
@4tehlulz: Did you mean stupid because he even said it, or stupid because if his maximum rate is 15%, his effective rate must be lower.
Insert usual marginal versus overall tax rate ignorance rant.
Comrade Dread
But is completely logical from a certain point of view.
If an unauthorized person looked at your online materials, that would be an invasion of privacy.
So we’ll simply write a program that does it and analyzes it for us and sends us results purged of identifying information, so no person violates your privacy.
Sort of like that show: Person of Interest.
4tehlulz
@catclub: Either way….
Jewish Steel
My right wing sock puppet (the sweetest little evangelical Christian girl from the sub-continent)balances out my own sentiments.
I wanted to make sure my friends know about this latest bullshit. So I posted it on FB. And there’s the problem right there.
eemom
Can we please have ONE fucking post that mentions FB without people chiming in for no other reason than to brag about how fucking smart they are for hating FB and avoiding it like the plague??
Yeah, you’re all fucking geniuses. We GET it.
Jewish Steel
@eemom: We don’t HAVE a teevee…
Steve in Iowa
@Dan: Here is my FB status from yesterday: “Happy MLK Day! I would like to personally thank Ron Paul for doing everything is his power to not make this day happen!”
Would that be positive Paul sentiment?
Southern Beale
@The Moar You Know:
There’s definitely a stalker element to it. And who was it — Wal-mart? — who wanted to put little radio chips in pharmaceuticals, to track how far away their customers traveled or some shit like that? Hell that was YEARS ago. We’re so 2000-and-late to this discussion.
Look, the reality is, modern life is just too easy to fight this shit. You use a debit card because carrying around a wad of cash is a hassle. That’s just the way most people live nowadays. Resistance is futile.
Donut
@eemom:
I don’t hate FB. I opened an account there about four years ago with accurate info about myself, gathered a few hundred friends from my various exploits over the years…messed around with it for awhile…and then I deleted it about 2 years ago, after getting a stern lecture from my web developer/database expert buddy. He’s done work for Wal-Mart in the past, so he probably knows evil when he sees it, and he was so adamant that FB would get more and more intrusive, and that if I didn’t want them prodding into every aspect of my life, I should delete my account and re-register using fake info. IRL, I am a forty year old dude living in Illinois. On FB now, I am a seventy year old lady named Larry.
Look, FB is a really convenient way for people who are geographically distant to share pix and keep basic tabs. My wife’s family is all in CA, and some of my family in FL, so we only visit in person one or twice a year, if that. We now only have 25 friends and all but about a half-dozen are family, and we’ve utilized every single privacy tool the site provides. For us that’s the way to go. I don’t care if you use FB or not, and I certainly don’t have any superiority complexes over how I manage my online info. Thanks to my buddy’s reminder, I am doing better at that than ever. Yeah, debit and credit card use has some of the same pratfalls, but at least I control who initially gets my debit card number – can’t really say that about the info FB decides to share, such as this Politico deal. What a joke that is.
Gin & Tonic
@Donut: For what you’re doing, it sounds like Diaspora is a much better fit than FB.
Sentient Puddle
@eemom: Of course not. This is the Internet, you give people an opening to ramble or rant, they’ll take it.
bnmng
I’m not putting any of my secrets on Facebook anymore.
gaz
Good thing I’m moving to mexico. They can’t afford a surveillance state.
Triassic Sands
@MattF:
Oh, it’s possible Perry is even dumber than we think and that’s incredibly, amazingly, stupefyingly stupid.
When I learned that he had been in the Air Force and had a pilot’s license, I couldn’t believe it. Either their standards are (or were) frighteningly low, or Perry has suffered catastrophic brain damage (or deterioration) between then and now.
I never thought of him as intelligent, but when I saw him in a debate, I was startled, shocked even, by just how dumb he is. It may just be a case similar to George W’s. A person with, say, average intelligence but zero intellectual curiosity does absolutely nothing with his brain for decades and the result is one incredibly stupid person. In this case, two.
“Use it or lose it” seems to apply. And the heaviest mental lifting Perry has done over the years probably involves how much money to leave in the collection plate at church on Sunday. He may also have wondered if Jesus was left-handed or right-handed.
scav
@gaz: They also probably can’t afford to legislate against a surveillance multi-national corporation — not that many states that can theoretically afford to do so are in fact doing so. Additionally, don’t count out less technologically-dependent (and probably cheaper) ways of building a surveillance state. Ever lived in a really small town?
Donut
@Gin & Tonic:
Thanks for the tip – will check it out.
worn
@eemom: If I can toot my own horn for a second: my intelligence is quite unassailable and I am most disinclined to have positive feelings towards Facebook, so I have settled on the cautious stance of treating it like a diseased sack-cloth, namely, that my behavior decidedly smacks of circumvention
j low
I look at this as an opportunity to have some fun. From here on out I will include “Fuck You Politico” to all of my status updates. :)
Jamey: Bike Commuter of the Gods
Not sure how robust the datamining algorithms are, but just to be safe, I am going to misspell the name of every pubic figure I write about on FB. Starting with 0bmaa.
stormhit
The original piece even says this- but I fail to see how this is different than Google spitting out data about search trends. If you’re logged in that’s “private information” they’re tracking as well.
opie jeanne
@Montysano: Thank you. Wait, are you Steve from TCHS?
Yutsano
@opie jeanne: I finally gave in to the Facebook craze because of wifey. It’s good to have an immediate communication medium like that, but I limit heavily the information I put on there.
OT: I’m stuck in my house in Northgate. What are you getting for snow in Lynnwood?
Donut
@stormhit:
The problem with accepting the information as presented by Facebook is that they have been known to not be so truthful nor careful with their users’ data. Whatever. I have made it a solid habit to avoid publishing any political expressions on my FB page anyway.
opie jeanne
@Yutsano: Woodinville. Hollywood Hill, lots and lots of snow. There was already about 6 inches on the ground from Sunday.
Not quite a white-out here, but I’m looking at this stuff with Southern California beach town eyes (we still own a cabin in the mountains, where five feet in a single storm is fairly common, but that’s the mountains and doesn’t count). We stopped at the market on the way home on Saturday evening, thank goodness, haven’t touched the cars since. I think we’d have to chain up to get out of here, so it’s a good thing we have some fresh produce in the house.
Dave made chicken soup on Sunday, and we ran out in the snow and liberated a few carrots from the garden.
Getting just a little cabin fever-ish.
Yutsano
@opie jeanne: Mmm…winter carrots. I bet those guys are really sweet!
I opted out of driving in since the idiots in Denver decided not to make the call. Now I’m wondering if anyone will deliver pizza in this mess come dinnertime. I doubt it. :) Fortunately I also stocked up some Saturday, so I’m good for a bit.
gaz
@Yutsano: Always befriend the owner of a local taxi service if possible. =) Fvckin sage advice, I’m tellin ya.
I can get food delivered. They have chains. heh.
Julie
@deep: Exactly. Data mining like this is pretty standard in marketing and comms research — and not just on Facebook. There is so much data it’s really hard to isolate individuals from the herd. Companies, political types, etc., are looking for two things, generally: trends and outliers. Could it be used for nefarious purposes? Sure, probably. But that’s not the primary value at this point. We’re not talking Morgan Freeman in The Dark Knight here… especially since the data collection and sentiment analysis is generally only about 70% accurate, based on industry standards.
opie jeanne
@Yutsano: They were very sweet carrots.
I planted all sorts of carrots last year and kept scrupulous records on where they were located in the box so that I now know Nantes Coreless is a brilliantly good carrot here, fat and sweet, keeps in the ground without splitting. The Danvers Half-long was fine for a while but not so good now. They grow all gnarly if left too long, or they split.
Unfortunately I didn’t keep such scrupulous records about the carrots as we harvested them. For instance, I don’t remember how the Nantes Sweet Treat or the Scarlet Nantes performed, and I didn’t take notes. I think we ate all of the Little Finger as soon as it was ready, and I think the Touchon was another bad splitter.
The Nantes Coreless will fill most of our carrot needs, though, so we’ll grow a lot of that next year, and try something else that I will promise to keep track of but probably won’t.
What idiots in Denver are we talking about here?
We went for a walk in the snow with our cameras and I think if we want pizza it will have to be made here, but I do have some good recipes for the dough. What I don’t have is any of the right types of cheese or anything else that would make a reasonable topping…. except onions? I have a lot of those. Maybe I should plan that for tomorrow, if I can figure out a way around the cheeses we have on hand.
Here’s your Currier & Ives moment, below. I assure you the owners are not Democrats; they are among the crowd wringing its hands over the possibility of having to support Romney.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/snowwhite/6716836109/sizes/l/in/photostream/
opie jeanne
@gaz: Great advice.
I can’t figure out why no one here seems to own chains. Is this some sort of NWP machismo?