What Facebook Knows

What Facebook Knows

1. Time lines

   • invite people to add historical information such as places they have lived and worked.

2. "Like" botton

   • Appears on apps and websites outside Facebook and allows people to indicate with a click that they are interested in a brand, product, or piece of digital content.
   • Also been able to collect data on users’ online lives beyond its borders automatically: in certain apps or websites, when users listen to a song or read a news article, the information is passed along to Facebook, even if no one clicks “Like.”
     • Combine that kind of information with a map of the social connections Facebook’s users make on the site, and you have an incredibly rich record of their lives and interactions.

3. Facebook has all this information because it has found ingenious ways to collect data as people socialize.

   • Users fill out profiles with their age, gender, and e-mail address; some people also give additional details, such as their relationship status and mobile-phone number.

4. Facebook is not above using its platform to tweak users’ behavior, as it did by nudging them to register as organ donors.

   • Unlike academic social scientists, Facebook’s employees have a short path from an idea to an experiment on hundreds of millions of people.

5. People are 50 percent more likely to remember ads on the site if they’re visibly endorsed by a friend.

6. “Our goal is to understand it so we can adapt our platform to give people the experience that they want.”

7. Since 2008, the company has offered a way for users to signal that they have voted; Facebook promotes that to their friends with a note to say that they should be sure to vote, too.

   • Marlow says that in the 2010 election his group matched voter registration logs with the data to see which of the Facebook users who got nudges actually went to the polls.

8. Facebook built its data storage system by expanding the power of open-source software called Hadoop, which was inspired by work at Google and built at Yahoo.

9. As executives in every industry try to exploit the opportunities in “big data,” the intense interest in Facebook’s data technology suggests that its ad business may be just an offshoot of something much more valuable.

10. Facebook itself uses Factual for information about business locations.

11. Facebook could sell its data science and points to its currently free Insights service for advertisers and website owners, which shows how their content is being shared on Facebook.

12. “The number of potential things that we could ask of Facebook’s data is enormous.”