Simonite, Tom. "What Facebook Knows." Technology Review, July/August, 2012.
From the article: "If Facebook were a country, a conceit that founder Mark
Zuckerberg has entertained in public,
its 900 million members would make it the third largest in the world.
It would far outstrip any regime past or present in how intimately it
records the lives of its citizens. Private conversations, family photos, and
records of road trips, births, marriages, and deaths all stream into the
company's servers and lodge there. Facebook has collected the most extensive
data set ever assembled on human social behavior. Some of your personal
information is probably part of it.
And yet, even as Facebook has embedded itself into modern
life, it hasn't actually done that much with what it knows about us. Now that
the company has gone public, the pressure to develop new sources of profit (see
"The Facebook Fallacy") is likely to force it to do more
with its hoard of information. That stash of data looms like an oversize shadow
over what today is a modest online advertising business, worrying
privacy-conscious Web users (see "Few
Privacy Regulations Inhibit Facebook") and rivals
such as Google. Everyone has a feeling that this unprecedented resource will
yield something big, but nobody knows quite what." Read more
See also
Simonite, Tom. "Few Privacy Regulations Inhibit Facebook." Technology Review, June 13, 2012.
