Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Facebook To Share Private Data With Politico

Posted by Soulskill on from the sharing-is-caring dept.

tomhudson writes "AllThingsD is reporting that Facebook has agreed to share users' private data with Politico. Quoting: 'Most notably, the Facebook-Politico data set will include Facebook users' private status messages and comments. Every post and comment — both public and private — by a U.S. user that mentions a presidential candidate's name will be fed through a sentiment analysis tool.' Yes, they claim it will be anonymized, but we've seen that doesn't really work in real life."

6 of 157 comments (clear)

  1. Google does the same by TechGuys · · Score: 5, Informative
    Even the article mentions it:

    This is similar to the way Google offers reports on search trends based on its users’ aggregate search activities.

    In fact, all of this is public information too. You can look at search amounts for specific searches here.

    It's just numerical data. Facebook seems to do this analysis by searching all the posts that mention candidate's name and if the associated words are positive or negative.

    The comparison to anonymized data in the summary is stupid. Facebook publishing any of those messages, they're just doing analysis on them. There would be good point in this article if they actually published those messages because then anonymizing doesn't work, but it's a moot point because they aren't making anything public. Only the aggregated search amounts.

    1. Re:Google does the same by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This is completely different.

      Google is taking data that users are providing them, and doing statistical analysis on that data. There's no issue with this, because it's not leaving Google.

      Facebook is taking data that users are providing them, and sending it off to a third party to do statistical analysis on it. This is a terrible invasion of privacy, because Facebook users never intended for their private data to be shipped off to other companies.

      If you can't see the difference here than you're either dumb or an anti-Google shill.

    2. Re:Google does the same by sakdoctor · · Score: 5, Funny

      I was hating facebook before it was cool to hate myspace.

  2. when will the FBI come for me? by alen · · Score: 5, Funny

    i LOVE our glorious President. he's the Dearest Leader i've ever had

  3. It's simple... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    We just have to troll the data by posting nothing but Ron Paul links on Facebook. /looks at Facebook feed

    See! Everyone's already doing it!

  4. Re:"Facebook To Share Private Data" by Kenja · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If you gave the data to Facebook, it was never private in the first place.

    --

    "Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"