Sometimes, being wrong on the Internet means having to say you’re sorry. Facebook offered up an apology to its users on Sunday, after it came to light that the company had manipulated the news feeds of more than half a million people so it could change the number of positive and negative posts that appear from their friends.
“I don’t have one single photograph of her, even though we spent the better part of our youth together. She never let anyone take pictures of her. Now that she is gone. I wish more than ever I had some sort of records of our time together. A proof of our love. But I have none.
But it is not entirely true (…).”
The FBI is getting set to deploy its own system of computerized facial recognition, called NGI. It will bring together millions of photos in a central federal database, reaching all 50 states by the end of the year.
But compared with Facebook’s DeepFace system it isn’t very good. Give Facebook two pictures, and it can tell you with 97 percent accuracy whether they’re the same person, roughly the same accuracy as a human being in the same spot. To be fair, Facebook has a whole network’s worth of data on its side.
The nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency is getting outgunned by a social network.
“Digital gerrymandering” represents a frightening future. Here’s how to prevent it.
On November 2, 2010, Facebook’s American users were subject to an ambitious experiment in civic-engineering: Could a social network get otherwise-indolent people to cast a ballot in that day’s congressional midterm elections?
The answer was yes.
Charlie Brooker: Facebook’s emotion study reveals it is hopelessly disconnected from emotional reality: that people get upset when people they care about are unhappy.
Are you at the mercy of technology? Take the quiz to find out if your habits put you at risk.
Facebook released the results of a study where its data scientists skewed the positive or negative emotional content that appeared in the news feeds of nearly 700,000 users over the course of a week in order to study their reaction.
The study was almost certainly legal, a line in the terms of service users agree to when they sign up cedes control of data for “data analysis, testing, [and] research”. But the reaction from many users and commentators has been pretty negative.
Facebook caused a stir over the weekend with the revelation that it had been altering the content of some users’ News Feeds in an attempt to study the psychology behind what causes people to post…
Based on The Next Web’s review, Facebook Home looks to be underwhelming. However, the value Facebook gets from your phone could be big.
With Home, Facebook has crossed the line between something people check to become something that’s always on, checking in with us, fighting for attention, waving people we know in our face. Rather than a tool we use to talk to others, the phone, thanks to Facebook, has become something that communicates to us. And it’s Facebook that gets to do the talking.
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