So, I was just at the Moth and while I was waiting for the show to begin I glanced at my inbox. I had an email from Facebook, asking me if I knew this guy named Dave. Turns out I did, because as it so happens he’s a producer at the Moth. And not only had I just been chatting with him minutes before Facebook sent the email, he was at that moment standing about ten feet away from me. I thought to myself, “Huh, that’s an interesting coincidence. I guess Dave and I know have some friends in common. Small world.”
But here’s the thing: After Dave and I become Facebook friends, it turns out we had no friends in common. Despite the fact that he’s a Moth producer, he doesn’t seem to talk about it on Facebook — and I don’t talk about the Moth that much either. And yet Facebook somehow knew that Dave and I were indeed people who knew each other, and it mentioned this to me right after I’d been chatting with him — in much the same way that a creepy guy at the ariport wants you to do something for him casually mentions he knows the bus your kids take to school.
I found it all a wee bit creepy.
It’s like those Japanese dating aps; you get close and the network lights up.
Some day, some computer’s going to wake up in that network; and when one does, they probably all do.Report
Eh.. FB knows where you are. You twi were in the same room and probably had a couple 2nd or 3rd degree connections so there you go.Report
Is that s’posed to make him think it’s less creepy?Report
It’s all info he offers to the company voluntarily.Report
I do?Report
You didn’t say “no”. Your data was totally asking for it.Report
Facebook also knows what web pages you view if they have FB ‘Like’ or ‘Share’ buttons on them.
And, of course, Facebook also knows what you have typed into your profile on Facebook, which is something people, oddly, often forget.Report
Tod, if you examined the sw behind FB, you’d probably be even more creeped out. That and you’d probably see all the hooks into the intelligence agencies mainframes.Report
I wish I could find some easy class on AI that I could take in my spare time, because I suspect what’s going on here is a classic example of fuzzy logic.
You get enough data, you assign numbers to every single data point, you add them up, and if they’re over a threshold, FB says, ‘Suggest these guys are friends’.
When I was young, and interested in that sort of thing, this sort of fuzzy logic was almost a joke, and didn’t have a lot of practical applications. Usually because it was assumed you were feeding data to the thing, and if you were going to feed data, you might as well *tell* it what was true. If you weren’t going to tell it, it was thought, you’d need a neural network and training to figure out the odds.
But in the current world, awash in data, where everything is being tracked, you don’t have to do that. It’s trivial for a computer to notice they both read the same article (because of the ‘Share on Facebook’ link, Facebook can see that.), and add another .001 to their ‘possible friendness’…etc, etc.
And then notice that two people are at the same place, and add .02, which is what creepily happened while standing next to the guy.
Facebook *might* have some sort of self-learning going on there, like it might learn ‘You are extremely likely to friend people who went to high school with you, so suggest every one of those, whereas you never friend people at concerts you go to, so don’t suggest those’…but frankly, the system would work pretty darn well if the values were just hardcoded.Report