Social Decay
Andrei Lacatusu
makes sense that facebook and insta has been down
Facebook has filed thousands of patent applications since it went public in 2012. One of them describes using forward-facing cameras to analyze your expressions and detect whether you’re bored or surprised by what you see on your feed. Another contemplates using your phone’s microphone to determine which TV show you’re watching. Others imagine systems to guess whether you’re getting married soon, predict your socioeconomic status and track how much you’re sleeping.
Facebook has said repeatedly that its patent applications should not be taken as indications of future product plans. “Most of the technology outlined in these patents has not been included in any of our products, and never will be,” Allen Lo, a Facebook vice president and deputy general counsel, and the company’s head of intellectual property, said in an email.
Taken together, Facebook’s patents show a commitment to collecting personal information, despite widespread public criticism of the company’s privacy policies and a promise from its chief executive to “do better.”
“A patent portfolio is a map of how a company thinks about where its technology is going,” said Jason M. Schultz, a law professor at New York University.
Here are seven Facebook patent applications that show how the company has contemplated gathering and exploiting your personal information.
Read more - https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/06/21/opinion/sunday/facebook-patents-privacy.html
Facebook posts may not seem like a window into your soul but, taken together, your social media activity likely reveals a huge amount about how you live: The hours you’re awake, how sociable you are, and, yes, even who you’re likely to vote for. These online psychological profiles are more vulnerable to manipulation than most of us like to believe.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, Ms. Sandberg and other company leaders have struggled to address a growing set of problems, including Russian interference on the platform, the rise of false news, and the disclosure this past weekend that 50 million of its user profiles had been harvested by Cambridge Analytica, a voter-profiling company that worked on President Trump’s election campaign.