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Facebook Has Mapped the Entire Human Population of Earth (cnbc.com)
Facebook doesn't only know what its 2 billion users "Like." It now knows where 7.5 billion humans live, everywhere on earth, to within 15 feet. From a report: The company has created a data map of the planet's entire human population by combining government census numbers with information it's obtained from space satellites, according to Janna Lewis, Facebook's head of strategic innovation partnerships and sourcing. The mapping technology, which Facebook says it developed itself, can pinpoint any man-made structures in any country on earth to a resolution of five meters. Facebook is using the data to understand the precise distribution of humans around the planet.
Just when I think Facebook can't be more creepy and intrusive they manage to surprise me.
They really haven't.
Even in North Korea? That just smacks to me that they have CIA funding. The CIA used to do the Worldbook fact thing, Now all they have is Facebook.
Even if you never signed up. Even if you block their IP ranges. You cannot escape. People wave phones around, take photos, immediately upload them to Facebook. Facebook performs biometric analysis on everyone in the photo, even non-Facebook users, for "shadow profiles".
What's that? You think you turned away in time? Oh, sorry:
Since then, Facebook has continued to deepen and enrich its facial recognition technologies. An algorithm from the company’s artificial intelligence research group managed the seemingly impossible task of recognizing people 83% of the time even when their faces were not visible.
Unless you are a hermit who never leaves his cave and has no friends, you ARE in Facebook's database, whether you signed up or not. Your image has been recorded, your face has been associated with your identity and your home address and thus forth. Unless you are among the few who block FB IP ranges, also associated with your internet usage when not on FB itself.
You cannot escape this monster. You can try, but your friends and family are agents of it now too.
No map in TFA.
-1 Irrelevant.
I was gonna write "can you get any more creepy?"
But then I took a step back and now I suspect they are already in my head!
Now now, let's not all panic. Perhaps Facebook intends to do only good things with all this information!
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Total BS. But it makes a good story.
"Now find them. Find them all- the humans. Kill them."
Now all they need is a few billion robot drones. Or a satellite laser system.
Maybe they could sell the information to the appropriate governments looking for some people.
(US Citizen) "Hey guys, check this out. I combined information and I know where every single human on the planet is."
(US Government) "Seize the terrorists assets immediately and throw him in prison indefinitely."
[Meanwhile, over in the land of Too Valuable To Fail...]
(Facebook) "Hey guys, check this out. We combined information and we know where every single human on the planet is."
(US Government) "Oh wow, hey cool. Mind if we get a piece of that? Sweet, thx."
Any more creepy than Google?
If this is true, perhaps Zuckerberg should be arrested for not assisting the authorities in locating all wanted terrorists, since Facebook apparently know where they are within a range of 15 feet.
According to "Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley" by Antonio Garcia Martinez, Facebook only has 2.5B+ people to convert into users. User growth stalls out after that as the few billion people who aren't users live in areas too remote for Internet access. Facebook will have to find new ways to grow that doesn't rely on adding new users in the future.
signed,
AC
[sigh]Creepy.[/sigh] I think privacy has been over for some time in all our heads and gut feelings. But this is 100% documented proof now. Yikes.
Translation: stalk.
AC comments get piped to
that's got to be a bitch to fold.
This is the most dystopian sci-fi thing I've ever read.
Facebook needs to GO AWAY.
Pinpoint this one finger salute, Facebook.
"we are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further."
Oh! That kind!
I am a meat popsicle.
Facebook will have to find new ways to grow that doesn't rely on adding new users in the future.
If you listen carefully you can hear the milking machine running in the background.
Until around 2 years ago, some IP geo-locations tools were missing my actual location by over 900 km. Even nowadays, they rarely get my town and associate my network with neighbour cities up to 100 km away. My ISP is the biggest provider in Spain and I have a pretty standard dynamic-IP package. I don't use VPNs, proxies or similar approaches other than sporadically.
During the last quite a few months, I have been sharing a lot of information about myself online. I have written many posts about different issues and regularly updated my two sites, both of them with a relevant amount of information and quite search-friendly. But I am still getting involved in many misunderstandings, references to what I deleted years ago, inclusions in nothing-to-do-with-me categories, I rarely see advertisement which is appealing to me or to the generic group where I should be included, etc.
Something as simple as not including my own picture or regularly communicating in English despite living in Spain or simply not having the typical social-media activity are issues which seem very tricky for these systems. They seem to rely on very simplistic assumptions and to not be able to understand even slightly complex scenarios. I don't think that they are in a position to really maximise most of the collected information; certainly not for a big proportion of the worldwide population.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
Facebook claims to know where everyone lives...and Google Maps can't even find our house - it's claimed to be on a side street behind us where other houses that are on that side street are. They (Google) fixed it once after 6 correction submissions over 2 years, but it got retconned.
Facebook have to pay for my location which they appear to be unwilling to do. Too bad.
Maybe I overvalue myself or maybe they undervalue me. Either way, Im not for free.
Luv that gerrymandering data.
Even in North Korea?
"Entire Human Population"
Perhaps "entire" doesn't mean what you think it does?
Who here thinks that FB is just a simple ad-revenue company anymore?
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608156/global-urban-footprint-revealed-in-unprecedented-resolution/
There are some things that are better to not think about.
arxiv.org/abs/1706.04862:
Breaking New Ground In Mapping Human Settlements From Space—The Global Urban Footprint
Total BS. But it makes a good story.
https://geoservice.dlr.de/web/maps/eoc:guf:4326
They've mapped humans living in fixed structures at a point-in-time when the census was taken, plus people who have a fixed abode and either a public location and/or are a Facebook user. In some countries, census data is only released publicly in a non-aggregated form a long time afterwards (for the UK, it's 100 years). I'm not even sure all countries *have* a census, and certainly there are nomadic tribes, refugees, other homeless people, who won't be covered because... well, they don't have a fixed location.
I smell some lovely bovine excrement here, probably aimed at selling more adverts. Then again, if it's as accurate as their "targeted ads" they probably have 90% of the population of the world located on an iceberg in the the Antarctic.
Someone shoot that bastard in the head, then burn Facebook to the ground. Evil, evil, EVIL.
Where the fuck did this 7.5 billion people, "every person on earth" come from?
The article clearly says they have coverage of 23 countries, and "millions" of people.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
Could somebody please sue Facebook / Zuckerberg for crimes against humanity? It's mass espionage of all people in all countries on the Earth, most of them without any consent. Somebody should stand up against tyranny of the global corporations like Facebook, and individuals with messiah complex trying to force everybody their only right image of the world no matter what.
I wonder if the EU will do the right thing and extend its right to be forgotten proposals to allow you to demand that facebook, et al, remove all of that information about you? The other thing that might be fun is doing a subject access request and have facebook tell you everything that they know about you.
I am absolutely baffled at these developments. I protest with all strength of my heart. I can’t believe we [humans] are taking this kind of crap with such a resignation. My stomach revolves as I write this. Such a loss.
the next Hitler.
It doesn't know what they're buying, who they're fucking, or what crimes they're committing: It's quite a distance from 'big brother' power. It'll take a lot of money to answer those questions.
Do you think it's easy to give people digital banking/shopping, a digital wall for posting their selfies, a networked, mobile surveillance device? Umm, never mind.
Wait...they used census data? Oh yea, the "international census" (that doesn't exist).
I'm gonna call bullshit on this article.
Running for President yet ???
You should be...
5 out of 6 people enjoy Russian Roulette & 6 out of 7 Dwarfs are not Happy
Do you think if anyone would not use their Facebook id anymore and stop using a smartphone, the police or government will tag them as rogue, as they have something to hide and start tracking them somehow else.
*pretends to be shocked* But seriously, it's still creepy.
Putting together great/to the point articles that add value! Tech, Coffee and Travel!
Now no one will ever be lost again!
Or, on the other hand, you now can find where to go to really be alone!
Unless it doesn't work that way. With Facebook, who knows?
Before 2004 they used to say the good thing about internet was that no one knows you're a dog (meaning people judged others by their messages or contributions, not by their circumstance or class). I guess now GAFAM knows that you are a dog, where your kennel is and where do you hide your bones. Time to go dig and bite cables.
Of course they've been tracking you before you signed up. They're a branch of the FBI afterall.
What? You didn't really believe the FBI still drives around in black windowless vans with "Flowers by Irene" painted on the sides did you? Its so much more efficient for them to use your friends and electronics to spy on you than all that old tech.
Facebook says it will use its map data to help bring free internet access to un-served communities. BUT the 'Free Basics' internet service only provides restricted access to certain websites!
That prompted "65 advocacy groups from 31 countries [to] release an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg, calling then-Internet.org a 'walled garden' in which the world’s poorest people only have access to a limited set of online services approved by Facebook and local carriers," according to a Mashable report* in 2016.
In a final shot of irony, if you want to read that open letter, it is hosted on none other than Facebook itself**:
https://www.facebook.com/notes...
* "Just bringing Facebook's internet to Africa won't be enough" http://mashable.com/2016/11/04...
** Actually, some of the 65 advocacy groups posted their own copy of the letter, and some groups such as Open Media wrote follow-up letters with specific policy recommendations for Facebook to help keep the internet open: https://openmedia.org/sites/de...
Get rid of Facebook.
It gives you nothing but your own social life, which you own anyway.
Delete it!