Shocking but true. When I read my grandparents diary about the Spanish civil war(1936), I see they killed people for getting info about the relationships, friendships of the principal leaders so they could kill selected people and destroy entire public movements.
That happened in WWII too. When Soviet Russia entered Poland, the first thing they did was to investigate the links of relationships of the Polish resistance. They kill every single of them so nobody opposed the Soviets(if they opposed German domination they would oppose Soviet too).
That was not far ago. Today a single American company could store all your public information, and your messages(audio transcribing is starting to work) because you give them.
Facebook is great as a concept, but It would be a better idea using private implementations with your own servers not depending on a commercial company. Something simple to use with open communications...
On the upside, the prevalence of things like Facebook also introduces a lot of noise and weak social links.
Half a century ago you coud make a precision strike and kill half a dozen people to cripple somebody's life. Today you could start clipping off someone's 500+ Facebook friends or Twitter followers, but it gets really impractical really fast and the impact wouldn't be as strong.
Back in the day, you'd find a stash of letters and find your targets. Today Google, Facebook, and Twitter have hundreds of thousands of messages between me and thousands of other people. Where do you start? Especially if you're looking for something very specific like signs of strong relationships, your thesis on this could very well be its own startup or sociology study.
Having more data than you can swallow is cool and all, but pulling something valuable out of it is its own non-trivial task. Throwing raw computing power at it doesn't fix it either.
(Side note: I'm all for private/secure/distributed/federated implementations of... everything.)
If you've got the data it's not hard to figure out who the 5 most important people in someone's life are. Shear volume alone would give you a pretty good estimate I bet.
Volume of conversations with people on Facebook != volume on Twitter != volume on email != volume on IM != volume on the phone != volume IRL. [1]
Also it varies drastically year to year. I'm betting this wasn't the case 60 years ago.
Maybe I'm a special case.
Edit: [1] I mean that the social graphs vary drastically between social networks. In fact there's almost no overlap with people I talk to on each network. Kill them all?
I've read of algorithms using Facebook data that manage to predict when couples are about to break up. Filtering strong relationships is something Facebook already does - unless you choose the "Most recent" view, it'll show you what it thinks has interest for you - and it's usually right.
ya, but they didn't have any kind of advanced statistical analysis in the old days, they couldn't do keyword searches, and they couldn't graph your relationships - they just read the letters.
Wow, I'd never seen that before. But to be honest, we can't be too critical of a 19 year old Zuckerberg. We were all absolutely obnoxious at that age. We think we know everything and we want to believe that our ego is limitless. As this was written supposedly in the dorm room era of Facebook, it's easily dismissed. It's rude, yeah, but wouldn't you have boasted the same thing if you'd invented Facebook? I probably would have, too.
Beautiful. Thank you. When discussing privacy issues, I've been trying to find a good response to, "As long as you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about."
This is the best answer I've seen.
It's our responsibility as citizens to keep the gov't in line, though somehow we have been convinced that it is strictly the opposite. The more we share about our lives, the easier it is for various organizations to silence what they don't like.
hmm. someone should write a "virtual poland" application that analyzes a set of facebook pages, and figures out who to "neutralize". i think that might get some attention.
That happened in WWII too. When Soviet Russia entered Poland, the first thing they did was to investigate the links of relationships of the Polish resistance. They kill every single of them so nobody opposed the Soviets(if they opposed German domination they would oppose Soviet too).
That was not far ago. Today a single American company could store all your public information, and your messages(audio transcribing is starting to work) because you give them.
Facebook is great as a concept, but It would be a better idea using private implementations with your own servers not depending on a commercial company. Something simple to use with open communications...