So there's this for end users, are there any business-specific tools for marketers that Facebook has available or is planning to make now?
The Implications of Facebook Indexing a Trillion Posts
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Re: The Implications of Facebook Indexing a Trillion Posts
#22The "Deactivate your account" button is still the only privacy setting you need to click. The implications are only for facebook - now they have more rope to play with - and something else to maintain - this does nothing for users, who expressly waive their right to privacy from the outset in setting up an account.
Deactivating is designed to leave your account intact in case you change your mind. In fact, some people use this as a super-logout, deactivating their account when not using it. If you want to truly delete your account, the best way to express that intention is the harder to find button to delete your account.
Doesn't an inactive account expire after a certain time, and there is a 'grace period' to log back in before that time and keep the account?
On a side note: accounts are persistent through time, and it's not hard to match multiple old deleted copies (resignups) and create a 'super-account'
Re: The Implications of Facebook Indexing a Trillion Posts
#23Wouldn't this be a lot more useful if we could search ALL public posts by any person or business (FB pages)? Sort of like Twitter search. There'd be no privacy issue b/c u'd only be searching the public posts.
Re: The Implications of Facebook Indexing a Trillion Posts
#24The "Deactivate your account" button is still the only privacy setting you need to click. The implications are only for facebook - now they have more rope to play with - and something else to maintain - this does nothing for users, who expressly waive their right to privacy from the outset in setting up an account.
I find more useful keeping your account activated and reasonably empty. This prevents anyone from grabbing your name and imposing you, and allows you to use Facebook login at various sites without sharing too much.
Re: The Implications of Facebook Indexing a Trillion Posts
#25> Most obviously, the News Feed could learn to mimic our external dialogue, showing us posts with similar content to what we spread. Never talk about sports or babies? Facebook could eventually filter those out of your feed. Just shared your thoughts on Syria, celebrity gossip, or the police state? The algorithm could pull an audible and show you more about related news. I was pretty sure Facebook was already doing t…
I thought so too, though the only case I clearly observed is that fanpages you liked tend to show more often in your feed the more you interact with them. It feels like it follows some kind of exponential curve wrt. how often you like posts.
> Never talk about (...) babies? Facebook could eventually filter those out of your feed.
That would be a very welcome change.
Re: The Implications of Facebook Indexing a Trillion Posts
#26I wonder what Stallman might be thinking. He has been against Facebook since inception and in those days the main concern was not the state but private entities getting too much power over the consumers/users. I still think that this should be the main worry for the average Joe. https://stallman.org/facebook.html
Serious question - what's the fear in terms of what Facebook can or will do with that? That is, what can they do that would qualify what they have as power over someone?
Re: The Implications of Facebook Indexing a Trillion Posts
#27And all of this is brought to you by the friendly folks of PHP. Next time when you bash PHP because the argument order for functions is inconsistent, think about how some people overlook semantics and build great things with the tools they have at their disposal.
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Re: The Implications of Facebook Indexing a Trillion Posts
#28The "Deactivate your account" button is still the only privacy setting you need to click. The implications are only for facebook - now they have more rope to play with - and something else to maintain - this does nothing for users, who expressly waive their right to privacy from the outset in setting up an account.
I find more useful keeping your account activated and reasonably empty. This prevents anyone from grabbing your name and imposing you, and allows you to use Facebook login at various sites without sharing too much.
Depends on what your name is. The John Smiths of the world don't have anything to worry about on that front. I know of at least two other Vincent Guidrys. One's my father, the real-world consequences of that naming collision far dwarf anything Zuckerberg introduced into my life.
Re: The Implications of Facebook Indexing a Trillion Posts
#29I'm pretty interested in how this is implemented, actually. Naively you could search a global index and then filter results down to your friends, but that filter seems impossibly slow. Alternatively you could maintain a separate index per person, but querying 500 indexes seems unreasonable. Maybe they partition the graph into cliques which they index, search and then fix up with a second pass to add and remove noncli…
It is pretty straightforward. You could denormalize as much as you want upfront, or you could parallelize. Facebook does some of both.
Indexing is an exercise in denormalization. At the time I post X, the data is also stored in an index keyed by eg every phrase I wrote and maybe even stemmed by synonyms. This makes search fast. It is a memory-time tradeoff which basically precomputes the answer for every query, limited to my feed.
As for searching 500 indexes in parallel - this is hardly unreasonable. The alternative -- updating N indexes for every post where N is the number of friends -- is more unreasonable, since it does the maximum amount of work, when the vast majority of it is wasted. No friend is going to search for every single word. On the contrary, some friends will eventually search for a large number of words in YOUR index.
Facebook can easily do parallel queries and combine them. Even with a simple MySQL partitioned / sharded setup a site can do it. We do it at Qbix. Let alone Facebook which has improved on mapreduce in their architecture to be more dynamic (http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2012/11/08/facebook-engineeri...) and then there's this: http://www.semantikoz.com/blog/hadoop-2-0-beyond-mapreduce-w...
So yeah. That's how they probably do it.
Re: The Implications of Facebook Indexing a Trillion Posts
#30I wonder what Stallman might be thinking. He has been against Facebook since inception and in those days the main concern was not the state but private entities getting too much power over the consumers/users. I still think that this should be the main worry for the average Joe. https://stallman.org/facebook.html
Serious question - what's the fear in terms of what Facebook can or will do with that? That is, what can they do that would qualify what they have as power over someone?
Depends entirely on what they (and people related to them) have shared with Facebook directly and indirectly, and what Facebook actually can infer from the information.
Apart from that I have no answer. However, I find it important to realize the question shouldn't be about what Facebook/whateverelse can "do" now, but what will "they" be able to "do" in the future.
Imagine if there was some Superior Entity which knew everything about every single person born after some year X. What could that Superior Entity do? What could it entail if the knowledge of this Superior Entity got leaked to some hands? I mean, everything about politicians, press, authorities, laymen, teachers, children... Everything.
What are the actual practical worst-case implications of total ubiquitous surveillance for an individual? For society? This certainly depends on the society. Implications are certainly different for people living in, say Iran, Sweden, USA, Canada, Brazil, Russia, China, Germany, North Korea ... For example in some countries religious matters, although very personal, can be very serious. Go being an open atheist in say Indonesia.
I really have no clue, but everything seems like a huge mess with surveillance.