mine my data hard

i have always been mildly skeptical of facebook for no other reason than the fact that it’s mildly creepy in its’ ability to tell you anything about some random person’s life that they don’t specifically keep private. myspace can be much more personalized and privatized; thus why i enjoy it more (among other reasons.)

recently though, i have been using facebook a lot more, mostly for Glitterbomb advertising and networking for which facebook just works better. while lots of people may talk MySpace down for being a part of a conservative media conglomerate, Facebook has not been without its’ share of controversies.

of the most recent, occurring only days ago, a blogger at The Consumerist uncovered Facebook’s altered-yet-unannounced Terms of Service. apparently, Facebook decided that it was the sole owner of all property you placed on Facebook now and forever–even after you delete your account. it didn’t take long for thousands of Facebook users to start online groups protesting the change of ToS such as “People Against the new Terms of Service (TOS)”. yesterday, the owner of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, caved to pressure and decided to revert to the old Terms of Service until a new agreement could written.

it would seem that this is another example of online activists (in this case, Facebook users) creating giant forces in less than two days and winning a victory for online privacy–but what is going largely unnoticed on Facebook (and on countless other social networking and other websites) is the stealthy data-mining technologies like Beacon. Data-mining technologies scour the internet, endlessly collecting data about each individual member-recognizing patterns and cataloging those patterns in order to directly advertise to members of the website.

most of us are used to this type of advertising. we sign onto facebook or myspace (for example) and are bombarded by advertisements that are connected to keywords in our profiles and the things we search for on Google. in my case, I get a lot of ads for Drag queens, djing equipment, gay cruises–etc. these programs watch everything we do online, process it into a pattern–a market niche– and throw it in our face. it’s capitalism thrown into hyperdrive. the people don’t control the markets, the corporations prepackage the markets for us according to calculated data patterns they concocted by spying.

so while fighting against overt breaches of online privacy in one case is appreciated, i think facebook users are simply ignoring the bigger problem of of data mining and predatory advertising.

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in the recent past, i found myself cornered in the back seat of an aquaintances’ car in the Complex parking lot with Tyler. While in said person’s car, he yammered on to us from the front seat about his job as a data miner. to make a long story short, this guy spent a good 20 minutes trying to convince tyler and i about the great possibilities of data mining and what it does and could do for online advertising. i found myself pretty horrified at this person’s profound appreciation for tracking a person’s web activity and subsequent advertising bombardment. i felt i had to get out of the car before i puked all over myself. all that talk was upsetting my delicate sensibilities.

not too much longer, tyler did puke—but that was just the amazing amount of alcohol he consumed in an hour.

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