Slashdot Mirror
Facebook Data Miner Will Shock You
MojoKid (1002251) writes "A new website sponsored by Ubisoft as part of its advertising campaign for the upcoming hacking-themed game Watch Dogs isn't just a plug for the title — it's a chilling example of exactly how easy it is for companies to mine your data. While most folks are normally averse to giving any application or service access to their Facebook account, the app can come back with some interesting results if you dare. Facebook's claims that it can identify you with 98.3% accuracy based on images.The Datashadow app also offers the ability to compare various character traits and gives a great deal of information about total number of posts, post times and inferred values about income, location, and lifestyle. Is Ubisoft actually performing some kind of data analysis? Almost certainly not. This is far from an exhaustive, comprehensive examination of someone's personality or FB posting habits. The companies that actually perform that kind of data analysis are anything but cheap. The point Ubisoft is making, however, is that your FB profile contains enormous amounts of information in a single place that can be mined in any number of ways. All of this information absolutely is combined and collated to create detailed digital profiles of all of us, and the more we engage with various online services (from Facebook to Google Plus), the larger the data pool becomes."
...I don't use Facebook. I'd keep away from it all if I could, but it's hard to be in the tech industry these days and have no/minimal online presence.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
would it be too much to ask for a link to the website you're talking about
You know it's true.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Tor should be the default network stack for the internet.
Providing credentials/identity anywhere must be an active decision.
I'd place a small wager that Ubi partnered with Wolfram Alpha on this - I did the Watch Dogs thing about a week ago, and thought it was actually a quite coolly stylized representation of basically very close to what WA spits out as analysis of my Facebook profile. I wasn't shocked. Rather, I thought it was pretty trick marketing, and was impressed.
You send ALL of your pictures and your phone number and your email address to this site..
Every morning you post everything that little mitzi and junior did at the ball game yesterday, as if anyone cares. You're favorite movies, books, TV shows, who you are in a relationship with. People will put EVERYTHING about them in their Facebook profile, and then they're surprised that it's easy for this company to track your habits, or for potential employers to screen you?
Kinda like Mussolini pointing that Hitler is a Dictator.
FBI
Anyone who has a legitimate concern for their privacy and personal security has absolutely rid themselves of google plus and facebook. It didnt take a clever app to convince us, foiled fedoras or not, that we were as much a product as a herd of free-range cattle. our cud would be our status, the apple our friend request. We were to spend lazy afternoons basking on the hillside in the glow of farmville and grow strong and fat on content from friends and our mobile devices. This app is the same as working a stun bolt in front of a heiffer. Sure its loud and gets a response every time, but one must wonder if the audience ever truly understands its ultimate implication.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Pity the article did not mention it: the site can be found at http://digitalshadow.com/ It seems to be US only, though.
Sic transit gloria mundi.
I don't have facebook, so the shock, is on you! hahahaha
http://digitalshadow.com/
That's the URL for checking it. Otherwise you have to click and click and click...
There's this line in the article that says "people with similar beliefs tend to cluster together" -- it may be my best defense against datamining me. The people I have on my Facebook - account pretty much have nothing in common with me except for family members, and even they only share blood with me. If you were to base your opinion on me on the people that have added me to their circles you'd pretty much be totally off the course.
Using this one weird trick!!!
I feed most / some my profiles with false information. The email address that I use for sign-ups gets most of my spam. The land line that I use for sign-ups goes to a two ring answering machine with a short message and minimum time to record the spiel. The intentional misspelling of my name shows up on my junk snail mail. The multitude of birthdays that I have show up regularly. I sign up for emailing lists that I have no interest in, then after awhile remove myself from said lists. Those are just some of the things done.
Passionately Indifferent
believe that slashdotters' posting habits and contents of their comments are of no mining interest to anyone?
It really won't shock me at all. Stupid Privoxy and its list of URL requests :-(
Online companies need to totally violate the populations need for privacy about things like life style orientation, health status, psychological profile, bad or deviant habits, etc., in contraindication to existing laws and intents contained within the legal system so they can continue to provide it to the NSA wholesale under likely secret laws. This is why, with the unholy collusion of our corporacratic oligarchocracy that the actual electorate has no say in the matter and is not being represented by it's elected officials or even being accurately and fully reported in the corporate media. This won;t change along with all out other current raft of social ills till there is a grassroots counter culture.
It's like a sick joke! They have a site that shows how much data they can mine (with your permission) and then they can do whatever they want with it?
Some of the same entities who maintain databases on you also develop and maintain personal profiles on you. This includes things like ability to defer gratification, sexual promiscuity / addiction, likelihood of having an STD (and which one(s)), sexual fetishes level of argumentativeness or agreeableness, your rank on a scale of respect for or defiance of authority,,(authoritarian scale), detailed political beliefs, number of past boyfriend or girlfriends and whether you were dumped or dumpee, likely personal frailties (vanity, you think you're too fat, you think you're smart, you conduct yourself with an exaggerated sense of entitlement). All o this is derived from FB ad other places and is used to profile you in various contexts from advertising to getting a job to loan applications to security checks and personal "risk profiles".
Trust me. .
I use Facebook quite a bit. I also leave nearly all of my information as viewable publicly. This digital shadow app couldn't even accurately present information that is publicly posted or information to which it was given implicit access by logging in through Facebook. Location, Active times, close friends, income.. All completely wrong. I think that page is just a ruse to gain access to your Facebook information, which will then be used for other purposes.
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
I would be shocked if it drove people to stop giving up private information for free to facebook.
Sidenote: While you are reading this, 6 trackers on slashdot.org are tracking you.
Just saying.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Shocked? Nope.
Facebook has a fictitious high school and no college for me, and no job titles it recognized, though I use real job titles, so it estimated my salary based on being a high school grad aged 49. It got it wrong.
All the boxes, and I'm not sure what was supposed to be in them, say "insufficient data".
It used words like "need" and "poop", in articles about my cats, to conclude I was self-absorbed, neurotic and insecure. On Facebook. Where even the most well-adjusted people post inane, narcissistic crap about themselves.
I'm sure Facebook does a better job of analyzing the data, and it'd be newsworthy to know what they are able to figure out about my humorous posts and incomplete, semi-fictitious profile. But this lame game tie-in is not newsworthy.
Nope. This is exactly what I expected. Thanks for playing.
Also, why do you have a link-bait title? Have we stooped so low?
> The point Ubisoft is making, however, is that your FB profile contains enormous
> amounts of information in a single place that can be mined in any number of ways.
Yeah, that's why we like it. That's why we use it. It's the point of Facebook. Without that info, what exactly would it be?
Seriously, if people didn't like it they'd have stopped using it by now. Please take the paranoia elsewhere; some of us have a life.
Unless you really _really_ open yourself up to Facebook, the info isnt a whole lot of good. They were totally off on where I was located, but were kind of close to where I worked but were also totally off the mark on income. The tags to/from classifications are interesting but really one dimensional.
I did like the list of easy to remember passwords they generated at the end, though.
that data mining is going on in this establishment...
The USA is only 4X older than me...perspective
It may be a coincidence. After giving permission to this Ubisoft site, my poker account of facebook was banned. What gives? Is the page a ruse to gain access to your facebook account?
Facebook Data Miner Will Shock You
No, no it won't. But only six words in I already feel like this story is treating me like an idiot. Nice.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Only if you allow such cookie or like button to appear. FB* facebook* etc... all forwarded to 127.0.0.1 and strict cookies rules does wonder for the like button.
Ghostery, it works
The first thing all the security people tell you to do is turn off platform apps, and this site does not work without them. Nice.
That's what Ghostery is for...
Also:
echo "127.0.0.1 facebook.com" >> /etc/hosts /etc/hosts /etc/hosts /etc/hosts /etc/hosts
echo "127.0.0.1 www.facebook.com" >>
echo "127.0.0.1 facebook.net" >>
echo "127.0.0.1 www.facebook.net" >>
echo "127.0.0.1 s-static.ak.facebook.com" >>
Since it has been known there has been addon and programs to randomize that for you adding/removing unused fonts/drivers/codecs/etc.... Naturally this is an escalation race until then next one they use to identify. But in the mean time good luck linking all my persona together.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
This isn't frightening at all. It's kind of sad. It found pictures I posted on my facebook because I gave them access to it. Other than that, it notes that I have high levels of interaction with my wife and my mom, but thinks my mom and the best man at my wedding may be potentially hostile towards me. It thinks I live in the remains of an abandoned town that I went urban exploring in 2 years ago. Oh, and it thinks that I'm submissive and conformist because I use the word "awesome". Sorry, smart guy, I just grew up in the 80s. It's like letting some random douchebag psych undergrad look at your profile and analyze you from it.
We could not log you in: You can't log in to this app because you do not meet this app's requirements for country, age or other criteria.
I am the shadow, and the smoke in your eyes, I am the ghost, that hides in the night.
Bow before your elusive target!
No, not another stupid Farmville crap browser game where you're supposed to toss money at it. No, Facebook, the game.
The goal is to show up in a marketing research as someone who is anything but you.
If you play well, you can win your privacy.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
While most folks are normally averse to giving any application or service access to their Facebook account
Really? Most folks? I personally am averse to doing this (I also go to the 'extreme' of only ever using Facebook inside a Private Browsing window, you know, as a /. tin-foil-hat-wearer and all), but there are a lot of people who happily integrate, say, Spotify and Facebook.
Facebook knows I like fantasy, sf, art, cats, John Stewart, science and 1st Edition AD&D!
So I just tried it (it's digitalshadow.com if you are having trouble digging it up), and it's not great shakes. Mostly I got "Insufficient Data", but what few things it worked out it got mostly--even comically--wrong.
So why not use it but with wrong info? I caved because I was losing contact with some people that only network via social media. They got tired of emails and were impossible to get on a phone. My profile has nothing of importance. No location info. And all the data I did put in is wrong, grossly wrong. I never message directly with detailed info, I will just reply telling them to swap to email. This works for both of us. And harvesters have a very good set of data on me. It's just all wrong.
What shocked me indeed was the headline of the posting.
We have seen enough of these "This will shock you" in tabloids and lately even on CNN.
I am shocked to see this at Slashdot on consecutive two days.
Yesterday there was some other headline about how some rubber band shapes shocked scientists.
Let me read the headline and let me decide whether I want to be shocked or not. Why are you telling me that I will be shocked?
Pathetic!! Real pathetic!! Nothing turns me off more than the following three types of headlines.
"What this person said will shock you" ..."
"XXX did what to stop XXX ?"
"The five things every should
Slashdot is turning into tabloid. Instead of printing about trashy reality shows and gossip about royal families, they somehow find things related to technology. That's the only difference.
Slashdot, this had been a major turnoff.
Sigh!!
Why are you using Facebook?
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
FB logins are now required more and more to do things online.
A favorite radio station I listen to this morning mentioned all requests now must come via FB login.
Can't they see how utterly wrong this is?
It amazes me that anyone has to have this explained.
Then there are government entities, cities, counties, etc, that are requiring FB logins to communicate or connect with them.
This is so utterly wrong on so many levels.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Here's the URL that is missing from the summary.
BTW, this is child's play compared to what Google can do. Not to even mention the NSA...
At how poorly it handled me. It guessed my salary at less than 1/4 of what it is. It thinks people who are more important to me are the ones that I will "throw under a bus to save myself". It had an 8% accuracy guess as to my location, and barely managed to get me into the same state. Im not the most social on FB, but I have used it to keep in contact with people. Im still against the level of mining facebook does, but Im not particularly impressed with this.
I ran it, (after pausing all my various blocking wares), and in most fields it came up with: "insufficient data." Elsewhere, it was plain wrong. The few things it was able to figure out, like my age, are explicit on the FB page. And of course, it could determine my city, also explicit.
Of course, I'm old school, and never use my real name on the internet. I'm blocking trackers and ads, and tossing cookies each session, so I don't know if FB's getting much that is useful on me.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
I would be impressed if they didn't ask you to log into Facebook to mine your data. Anyone can mine data with full profile access. Let's see them mine that kind of data with a locked down profile. Whatever!
Hmmm this is what it reported for me:
We could not log you in: You can't log in to this app because you do not meet this app's requirements for country, age or other criteria.
I don't remember what country I told facebook I live in. I know my age is set to something reasonable. I wonder what criteria failed...
I have always imagined that someone was slobbering all over themselves with all the personal information that people seemed so trusting to post on this site. Its sickening.
I've seen these kinds of profiles in the past, and they're usually laughably inaccurate. They conflate data about people with the same name. They use old addresses and other stale data. They try to build demographics and come up with bizarre profiles that are so wrong that they're worthless.
I block:
127.0.0.1 facebook.com
127.0.0.1 www.facebook.com
127.0.0.1 www.facebook.net
127.0.0.1 www.facebook.org
127.0.0.1 connect.facebook.net
127.0.0.1 static.ak.facebook.com
127.0.0.1 s-static.ak.facebook.com
Suggestions?
I come here for the love
Some marketing company wants access to your FB info and you give it to them? That's undoubtedly the whole point of the digitalshadow.com website, to get their database updated with what FB has. And you fell for it!
It got a few things...ok..the only thing it got right was my average income...it was a reasonably close guess for the average it ran the last 10 years.
Other than that..it doesn't know me at all. It called me volitile, "You display unstable temperament and threaten to react with violence when provoked."
Yup, that's about all it got right.
I think the issue is most of the information I put on facebook is true, but it's only maybe 11% of the truth. Most of what's online about myself is only around 10% of the full truth anyway. It's a lot easier to keep most of your information secure when you just don't reveal it...or obfuscate it to the nth degree.
I'm curious to see what it says about me, but not so curious I'll give them access to the entirety of my Facebook account. Do they say what they'll do with your data afterwards? They must be sucking everything they can out of your account, and I doubt they destroy it afterwards even if you revoke permissions for their app.
This scam is a marketer's wet dream.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
This automated system is a mess.
I gave it access to my account temporarily, and afterwards revoked access.
Turns out, it can't identify my face, nor can it identify my political leanings or my income with any certainty.
It also couldn't figure out who my friends and enemies really were.
All in all? It's a game, and it's not really doing any "data mining" that we should be worried about. ...
Either that, or I'm a mischievous son-of-a-bitch that pads my timeline with fake information, and uses
my kids face for my profile picture a lot, and only pushes location information if it's funny, irrelevant, or
inconsequential.
Support FSF: Stop thinking with your wallet, and think with your imagination. (cc/non-commercial)
Too bad the game sucks.
I guess they are trying to regain all the hype they had before they released the very bad looking in game footage.
Ubisoft, sony, EA, etc all like to render screenshots and footage on extremely high end PCs with upgraded renderes and then call them in game screenshots.
Um, I went to this site. Its a trailer / promotional site for Watch Dogs. Yes, it scrapes your Facebook and presents the data in a cool hacker-esque animated "file". First off, you have to give it explicit access for it to work, so what is the problem? Oh, and it was hilariously wrong on pretty much every count except that my girlfriend is "important to me". Wow, watch out. SkyNet is here. *Rolls eyes*
What disturbs me is that whoever wrote this article was either a.) not very technically savvy to be so in awe over a game website or b.) deliberately trying to fan the cyberscare flames. Either way, fail.
Wow, it got just about everything wrong in analyzing my profile. Right off the bat it shows a picture of my girlfriend that it thinks is me. It shows pictures of people I have a high level of interacting with, one of whom is George Tekei who it says it doesn't recognize and I've only briefly met once at a political fundraiser. It also doesn't recognize Wendy Davis (running for governor of Texas) even though the picture they used isn't one I took, but an official campaign photo.
The commonly used words are out of context and were only used once each... Fire, Breast, Parties:
Photo from an Arcade Fire concert.
Photo from Breast Cancer fundraiser.
"I rarely go to parties unless they're for a political or charity event".
The "we can find you" shows a concert venue that is the 4th most common concert venue that I go to (only twice in the past year). This despite the fact that I have my home town listed and do check-ins at places there all the time.
My income is about 1/3 of what it actually is and wouldn't come close to paying for any of the vacations I posted about, or the property tax where I listed that I live, or for my boats and cars. This one surprised me the most, since I list where I got my graduate degree and the titles of my jobs and companies I work(ed) for.
The password attempts didn't even come close. My close friends and family could guess my "dummy" password really quickly (the password I use for sites I don't care about). My other passwords I wouldn't expect to be guessed at all since they're all different and randomly generated.
Now all of that said...
Ya, I see the point. There is data to be mined, and as foolishly as it is mined, it can be used even though the chances are high that it will be misused due to incorrect analysis.
I'm not sure what the answer is. Initially, I thought having a profile allows you to at least project what you want your profile to be as opposed to being off-grid, which I can't be in my profession. Now I'm realizing that increasingly, the issue may not be humans individually making assessments based on manually viewing your profile but by using very, very stupid tools.
Imagine this... an HR person looks for your profile and sees you're off-grid, ok toss that resume. They do a manual inspection and see you're high risk or acceptable. That's what we were dealing with, but now the HR person may get access to stupid tools and you could be labeled as risk for using keywords that were analyzed out of context.
Ugggh!!!
(oops, according to this tool, saying this once makes you depressed)
Apparently the site doesn't work if you are a filthy Canadian.
deviant
Consider Blackmail or Character Assassination
You display questionable moral judgment and proclivity for engaging in addictive behaviors.
not some blog, which links itself all interesting links to itself?
Facebook is tantamount to a public Stasi dossier that YOU keep updated for free for Homeland Security. It's equivalent to tattooing you concentration camp serial on your own arm. When you finally get rounded up and put in a real concentration camp, frankly, you'll deserve what comes to because if your own complacency and willful ignorance of history.