Interesting TEDtalk on social media, use of information, future of same

take everything

https://www.ted.com/talks/jennifer_golbeck_the_curly_fry_conundrum_why_social_media_likes_say_more_than_you_might_think

Hi.
This is one of the more thought-provoking TEDtalks I've looked at recently and thought it was worth sharing.
It's an interesting area, how this data is being mined and analysed to come up with what she maintains are pretty predictable results (using the power of scale).

To be able to fairly reliably infer religion, political persuasion, sexuality or even just more prosaic stuff like being able to predict when a young girl was going to get pregnant (as per her talk) is fairly eye-opening.
But what's really interesting is asymmetry in the possession/use of this data.

I doubt people even know that it can be used so precisely (another example of this asymmetry).
Interesting to hear her talk about the average facebook chump and whether they might want to know what these companies might be able to infer about you (and exploit) and redress the balance (so to speak).
Great talk IMO.

Eeden

Thanks for putting that up - very interesting.

This kind of thing is what makes me suspicious of social media. The frightening stuff is the stuff we don't know, and the information coming out right now about how facebook has been "experimenting" on users is quite disturbing.

http://online.wsj.com/articles/facebook-experiments-had-few-limits-1404344378

I don't use facebook - not for these reasons particularly, but hearing this sort of thing takes away any of the temptation to sign up.

Overheal

Oddly, I was just thinking about all this last night. I plan to do a write-up on my thoughts.