varanine

So if your phone doesn’t move from a single location between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. for say a week or so, Facebook can quickly deduce the location of your home. Facebook will be able to pinpoint on a map where your home is, whether you share your personal address with the site or not. It can start to build a bigger and better profile of you on its servers. It can start to correlate all of your relationships, all of the places you shop, all of the restaurants you dine in and other such data. The data from accelerometer inside your phone could tell it if you are walking, running or driving. As Zuckerberg said — unlike the iPhone and iOS, Android allows Facebook to do whatever it wants on the platform, and that means accessing the hardware as well.

This future is going to happen – and it is too late to debate. However, the problem is that Facebook is going to use all this data — not to improve our lives — but to target better marketing and advertising messages at us. Zuckerberg made no bones about the fact that Facebook will be pushing ads on Home.

Why Facebook Home bothers me: It destroys any notion of privacy. The Borg Complex strikes again. But that particular future isn’t going to happen to those of us who don’t have Facebook accounts. (via ayjay)

(via ayjay)

1 month ago -

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It’s as if we’re in a prison, writing long scrolls about our lives and sharing them with each other, staring outside at a fluid world where a small handful of people are free to live without digital chains.

And it’s Facebook who is walking up and down the halls of this prison, keys jangling from their belt, a swing in their step, whistling a happy tune. Facebook guards a prison which contains inmates that don’t even know they’ve been incarcerated. Inmates that want to be there. A voluntarily lock-up.

Zia Hassan, “I should probably quit Facebook”

(Source: zeitvox)

1 month ago -

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prostheticknowledge:

Facebook Demetricator

A browser add-on that removes all quantifiable information in your Facebook page, taking away any social currency or values from sight.

Developed by Ben Grosser, he got in contact to tell me what it’s all about:

Under its influence, Facebook no longer foregrounds how many friends you have, or how much people like your status. Instead these numbers are stripped away, inviting you to try the system without these things, to enable a network society that isn’t dependent on quantification.

More at his website:

The Facebook interface is filled with numbers. These numbers, or metrics, measure and present our social value and activity, enumerating friends, likes, comments, and more. Facebook Demetricator is a web browser addon that hides these metrics. No longer is the focus on how many friends you have or on how much they like your status, but on who they are and what they said. Friend counts disappear. ’16 people like this’ becomes ‘people like this’. Through changes like these, Demetricator invites Facebook’s users to try the system without the numbers, to see how their experience is changed by their absence. With this work I aim to disrupt the prescribed sociality these metrics produce, enabling a network society that isn’t dependent on quantification.

You can find out more and get the add-on at Ben’s site here

(via blerchin)

7 months ago -

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It’s a cute story, but it illustrates a crucial point: surveillance culture is leaky. Primary measurements beget chains of reasoning and implication. Second and third order conclusions can be drawn by clever observers and unintended consequences are the order of the day. That’s how we end up with stories of Target outing pregnant teens to their parents through the ultra-empathetic medium of coupons.

On the Leakiness of Surveillance Culture, the Corporate Gaze, and What That Has To Do With the New Aesthetic, Quiet Babylon

Read it all.

(via iamdanw)

7 months ago -

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Conventional wisdom, and even science, has it that cutting off contact with an ex makes for a smoother recovery. But nowadays … it’s much more difficult to get distance from an ex. … It isn’t as easy as tearing your rotary phone from the wall. It isn’t even as simple as deleting an ex’s number from your cellphone. There’s Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the rest of the Internet with which to contend.

My ex’s live-tweeted marriage reminded me of this. So did my most recent breakup with a man whom I remain connected to via three social media platforms. But then there came yet another reminder this week — a study with a finding that will surprise no one: “Facebook stalking” an ex “may obstruct the process of healing and moving on from a past relationship.” You can no longer pretend that hitting “refresh” on your ex’s profile is helping you “process.

Tracy Clark-Flory, Salon

And the study in question.

7 months ago -

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The reason cities have been engines of economic growth is that young people move to them, to make new ways of being. Taking advantage of the fact that the city is where you escape the surveillance of the village, and the social control of the farm. “How you gonna keep them down on the farm after they’ve seen Paris?” was a fair question in 1919 and it had a lot do with the way the 20th century worked in the United States. The city is the historical system for the production of anonymity and the ability to experiment autonomously in ways of living. We are closing it…

…The browser made the Web very easy to read… we did not make the Web easy to write. So a little thug in a hooded sweatshirt made the Web easy to write, and created a man in the middle attack on human civilization, which is unrolling now to an enormous music of social harm…

…if we’d had a little bit more disintermediated innovation, if we had made running your own web-server very easy, if we had explained to people from the very beginning how important the logs are, and why you shouldn’t let other people keep them for you, we would be in a rather different state right now. The next Facebook should never happen. It’s intermediated innovation serving the needs of financiers, not serving the needs of people. Which is not say that social networking shouldn’t happen, it shouldn’t happen with a man in the middle attack built into it.

Eben Moglen, 2012 Freedom to Connect conference keynote address.

(Source: whitneymcn, via notevensurewhy)

8 months ago -

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In the very long term there will actually be more dead people on facebook then there are people living on facebook. I’d estimate that crossover to be around 50 years into the future, possibly a bit later. I wonder at which point the atmosphere on facebook will change, from photo sharing website to digital graveyard, a place where we come to worship our ancestors.

Deadbook, the long-term Facebook - Jacques Mattheij

The math doesn’t seem right but the idea is interesting.

(via kenyatta)

Facebook was created as a monument to the living — and not just to life, but to the day-to-day mundanity of life. Death has no comfortable place on it, which is odd just because the rest of humanity has to struggle with understanding death. What will happen to all our social networks when we die? Won’t they still be in place on the Internet? Do we need to teach the Internet how to understand death, or something?

Maybe in 50 years Facebook will have a death department.

(via soniasaraiya)

8 months ago -

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