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Facebook is tracking what you don’t do on Facebook


Matsuda

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Facebook released a study (PDF) last week indicating that the company is moving into a new type of data collection in earnest: the things we do not say. For an analysis of self-censorship, two researchers at Facebook collected information on all of the statuses that five million users wrote out but did not post during the summer of 2012.

Facebook is not shy about the information it collects on its users. Certain phrasings in its data use policy have indicated before that it may be collecting information about what doesn’t happen, like friend requests that are never accepted. Capturing the failures of Facebook interactions would, in theory, allow the company to figure out how to mitigate them and turn them into “successes.”

Adam Kramer, a data scientist at Facebook, and Sauvik Das, a summer Facebook intern, tracked two things for the study: the HTML form element where users enter original status updates or upload content and the comment box that allows them to add to the discussion of things other people have posted. A “self-censored” update counted as an entry into either of those boxes of more than five characters that was typed out but not submitted for at least the next 10 minutes.

Das and Kramer tracked the activity of the random sample of five million users for 17 days in July 2012. The paper states that they studied the HTML form element interactions but “not the keystrokes or content.”

Over the course of those 17 days, 71 percent of the users typed out a status, a comment, or both but did not submit it. On average, they held back on 4.52 statuses and 3.2 comments.

In addition to that information, Das and Kramer took note of the users’ demographic information, “behavioral features,” and information on each user’s “social graph” like the average number of friends of friends or the user’s “political ideology” in relation to their friends’ beliefs.

They used this information to study three cross sections with self-censorship: how the user’s political stance differs from the audience, the user's political stance and how homogenous the audience is, and the user’s gender related to the gender diversity of their network.

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The demographic data suggested that people are more likely to self-censor when they feel their audience is hard to define. Posting an update to all of one’s friends, let alone one available to the entire public, is daunting because the audience is diverse. Users are less likely to self-censor a comment on someone else’s post, however, because the audience seems better-defined—they’re “succinct replies to a known audience,” the researchers write.

But highly specific audiences, like Facebook groups, also seemed to be tied to self-censorship. Das and Kramer speculate that this is because the group’s interests may be narrowly defined, and a poster may feel like they have to nail the right topic area.

Friend homogeneity was also linked with self-censorship. Men are more likely to self-censor than women, and even more so when more of their friends are male than female. People with “a diverse set of friends in fewer distinct communities actually self-censor less,” which Das and Kramer suggest means that “users more often initiate or engage in ongoing discussions with a diverse audience over a homogenous one.”

The authors suggest that “present audience selection tools are too static and content agnostic”—that is, the way users categorize Facebook friends happens along different lines than the ones determining how they share content.

The research is relevant to the methods of News Feed curating Facebook has been rolling out over the last couple of years. Facebook is no longer a static update hose; rather, it promotes content that it thinks users will be interested in based on how they use Facebook, from both friends and fan pages.

But those methods can’t to solve this problem of people shying from using Facebook, an event that sounds like one of Facebook’s biggest nightmares. It’s Facebook’s version of the shopping cart abandonment problem; when its users aren’t making the final clicks to feed the Facebook machine with the content it needs, it’s Facebook’s lost business.

The paper suggests that Facebook would somehow need to communicate to users that their posts will be well-received based on Facebook’s own News Feed managing dexterity. But neither homogeneity nor well-defined topic interest are related to more sharing, and these are in fact related to less sharing. Not only can users not easily determine how to share their content; based on the ineffectiveness of friend lists or groups, the study makes clear that Facebook can’t neatly clean up self-censorship, either.

The study also leaves out what is likely an important factor in self-censorship: what users decide not to share. The study indicates that Facebook can easily track the whens and hows of even the information users don’t give it, based on what’s collected in this study. The content of that information would be a possible next step. Facebook did not return requests for comment on whether the self-censorship instances are always curated for all users or if it was data collected specifically for the study.

Facebook seems to be placing increasingly heavy weight on the roads not taken: the site also recently indicated that it would start tracking minute non-interactions like mouse movements over its webpages.

As Slate points out, even information not explicitly submitted to Facebook, including passive actions like typing in a box, is covered as collectible by the data use policy. Users who are wary of being tracked, be warned: services like Facebook can see what you start, in addition to what you finish.





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Facebook is working really hard to continue to violate your privacy whilst also seeing if they can manage to keep you as a user to also see if you care or not about your privacy. Pedophiles will often rub or grope a child repeatedly to get them use to it before they begin severe rape, Facebook is doing it a bit differently but people still seem to enjoy their abuse. Whoever keeps using Facebook past this point has got to be either formally victimized in some way or people who ENJOY being hurt.

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Facebook records everything users type on the social networking site, including notes they choose to delete instead of posting, according to a new study that tracked the habits of nearly four million people.

Adam Kramer, a data scientist employed by the social network, studied the profiles of 3.9 million people for the study, dubbed Self-Censorship on Facebook. Kramer viewed activity on each profile by monitoring its HTML form element, which is made up of HTML code that changes whenever a user types in their Facebook chat, status update, or other areas where they speak to others.

While Facebook claims it does not track the words that are written in each box, the company is able to determine when characters are typed, how many words are typed, and whether they are posted or deleted. Kramer, with help from student Sauvik Das, spent 17 days tracking aborted status updates, posts on other peoples timelines, and comments on other posts.

They found that men are more likely to self-censor than women and that those users with a homogenous group of friends were more likely to censor themselves, perhaps in an attempt to best phrase the response that will be more acceptable to the rest of the group.

Decisions to self-censor appeared to be driven by two principles: people censor more when the relevance of the communication space is narrower, the report said. In other words, while posts are directed at vague audiences (e.g. status updates) are censored more, so are posts directed at specifically defined targets e.g. groups, because it is easier to doubt the relevance of content directed at the focused audiences.

The study determined that 71 percent of users self-censored at least once over the 17 day span, although the researchers noted that the remaining 29 percent would have almost certainly self-censored had the study lasted longer. The most commonly-censored mode of expression were comments.

Surprisingly, however, we found that relative rates of self-censorship were quite high: 33 percent of all potential posts written by our sample users were censored, and 13 percent of all comments, they concluded.

The researchers said that users choosing not to post could be worrisome because Facebook loses value from the lack of content generation. The data is being collected so that the social networking giant can devise new ways to promote users to share more.

Facebook has long been a target for privacy advocates who say the company is too liberal in how it uses customer data. Yet the companys terms and conditions mention that such studies may be conducted and that even information not specifically submitted to the site is allowed to be collected.

In October the Wall Street Journal reported that Facebook is testing technology that would hugely increase the amount of information it collects on customers. Ken Rudin, Facebooks head of analytics, said the company is preparing its infrastructure in preparation to store data about how long a users mouse hovers over a certain area of the website and whether the newsfeed is visible at any given moment on a persons mobile phone.

http://rt.com/usa/facebook-tracks-everything-written-posted-394/

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This's one of the reasons I hate Facebook and I'll NEVER open account there or even use it.

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This's one of the reasons I hate Facebook and I'll NEVER open account there or even use it.

Same. not just this shit F*ckbook, but also other craps Tweet, google plus etc.
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Simply , Facebook is the home of CIA ! :P


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Airstream_Bill

I hate to admit it but I have a FB account. I really do noting on it but keep track of some friends, school etc. and my Sister. I am soooo close to closing down my account. They have changed the privacy options two or three times in the last couple of months. I hope that someone does see the stuff I post about the NSA and other Government Agencies here in the US. Mostly I post stuff that is of no interest to anyone except Family members and I am not sure that most of them are interested. Ha. I know CLOSE the FB Account.

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As Slate points out, even information not explicitly submitted to Facebook, including passive actions like typing in a box, is covered as collectible by the data use policy. Users who are wary of being tracked, be warned: services like Facebook can see what you start, in addition to what you finish.

That's just great. Till now people had the entirely reasonable expectation that whatever they typed in an online form but chose not to submit remained private, but clearly that's not the case, especially on sites like Facebook. Not only is this sort of behavior extremely creepy, it is no better than malware that spies on users. Plus of course if FB is doing it can the rest (Google & co.) be far behind? So now we need to be careful, type everything offline and only copy-paste the final edited version. I wonder, how long before they start spying on what we type in other apps as well? God, how I hate sites like these and where this whole thing is headed - it just makes me puke out of sheer disgust. I swear, I'm going to stab the next person who sends me an invite! :angry:

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thank you logic i correctly guessed about this type of intrusion B) no more fb i made a correct decision :lol: ;)

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