Monday, 23 October 2017

Week 1 [23-29.10.17] Facebook

Read the article at  https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/23/facebook-global-takeover-f8-conference-messenger-chatbots and discuss it. Present your personal experiences.

25 comments:

  1. This article is really,really scary and disturbing for me. Mark Zuckerberg seems to be a virtual dictator who wants to run the world and he's almost there, believe me, because the most powerful weapon in the world is information. The person who has access to all kinds of information within seconds is the person who can decide about everything. Such a person is more powerful than all the kings,monarchs and dictators that ever lived and ruled.

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    1. But even though I find it totally scary, I do use Facebook, Messenger, Whatsapp to share photos and information with my friends and family. I guess the rule of Mark Zuckerberg is something inevitable.

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  2. I have Facebook account for 50 days. Only reason to create it was improvement of communication with basketball team. Article describes a lot of facts confirming high level of ‘fb’ management. But I would not invest in Facebook shares. Despite huge potential for development I see at least two big threats. Technology evolves very quickly and in unpredictable ways ,so in my opinion it is a matter of time when Zukerberg will make big mistake as Nokia did. The second scenario is reverse of trend of technology fascination in society. Now we are during “new toy phase”. I think that after VR revolution people start to miss real “face to face” contact.

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  3. This article certainly describes how Facebook diversifies other fields of internet and new technologies. As very wealthy company with crazy amount of users it must look for improvements and new features because users always want something new in order to keep using platform. The most frightening part for me is the idea of reading our intentions and emotions - how Facebook possibly can use those informations. I think that there is a boundary that should not be crossed anytime and interfering into reading our emotions is unacceptable for me. This may lead to multiple problems and wrong accusations, because of very complicated nature of human beings. Similarly the idea of 3D scan conversations seems to be interesting but on the other hand it would be very weird to see the hologram of the person, because partially you will feel like the person is present when it is actually not. Sooner of later no matter what our fears are this will happen, I don't think there is a way to stop development of technologies. The one thing is absolutely undeniable - our lives will be so much different in few years.

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  4. I'm not a facebook heavy user, but in general, I have nothing against companies collecting some data about my preferences and opinions. Quite the contrary, I want to be heard and I'm happy when a system recognizes that I had some problems or wasn't satisfied with a service and automatically solves it or inform a human consultant to contact me. The same goes with recommendations. I prefer to see an advertisement that is based on my needs or at least on current interests reflected by my browsing history than another random offer.

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  5. Very interesting article. A little scary, especially if the facebook user is unaware.
    I was surprised: "In the US the average 18- to 34-year-old spends 30 hours per month on social networking services" This is very much, we live in a world where we have less and less time. Excluding the serious aspects presented in the article. I agree with Adam, I prefer to receive personalized news and information than, SPAM. Everyone has a choice and can log out. Social awareness is important.

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  6. Quite interesting article, that summarize problem of large tech corporations impact on our society. I am not finding any disturbing news in this article, most of the included informations and facts are well discussed. Facebook never was hiding that its business model is based on information gathering and processing. Only one that is disturbing is that, there are still people that do not realize that. What is also worth to be mentioned is that Google is collecting even more data about us.

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  7. I am starting to being interest by subject of chatbots. Imagine that you have hundrets of question about product and artificial intelligence inside bot are helping you to explore information about product or service. I belive this XXth centry technology are going to have his golden age in the near future.

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  8. Guardian's article about Facebook describes how small website which was made in dorm become one of the largest communities online with diversified areas of interest, that are much above the classical content delivery service and social networking. I do agree with Piotr, who mentioned about chatbots, that it could be the one of the main trends in the nearest future especially if we concieder the progress in the field of of natural language processing. I have myself ambivalent feelings about this company. From one side, article recalls words of Om Malik, who remindes us that "if you’re not paying, you’re the product", which is fact. From the other side, Facebook has to maximize it's content quality to prevent regression of user's interest, which have positive influence to us, because we are getting dedicated content that satisfies our internal curious man. Furthermore, Facebook itself creates whole market for services which are depended of that service (for example: in marketing). In my opinion it is very interesting company, which has an ambition to become global tech leader, in every meaning of that words.

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  9. I agree with the statement from this article: “It’s about connecting commerce, not people”. In my point of view, the main aim of companies like Facebook is making money and therefore there must be a business issue in free services – otherwise it does not pay off.
    On the other hand I agree with Ewelina that users should be aware of the gathering information about them. We often do not read the terms and conditions and just press button “Next”.
    I’m sure that artificial intelligence and virtual reality are the future of Facebook because these technologies are becoming more and more popular and it was a predictable step. I think that bots are a very good move, too. Personally I prefer to have personalised ads rather than the random ones.

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  10. Facebook is the most mixed-feeling creating machine I know. For me, of course, because 90% of my family and friends use it without making any philosophy around it. All of them insist on the main advantage of it, I mean “connecting people”. But I agree rather with one of the opinion presented in the article, that FB connects commerce rather to connecting people. All the activities realized in FB frames leave traces, shadows, enabling other people to follow us, to propose us different goods (even we’re not sometimes conscious of that) and to use our data in unpredictable way.
    I don’t have too much personal experiences, because I felt very uncomfortable with all those “likes” system and my profile is a bit passive one… But it is enough to spend time with people using that to be forced to face unwanted situation. For example, my friend had birthday and I’ve taken her to restaurant, we’ve eaten and drunk nice things. I couldn’t stop her from making some pictures of colorful “menu” and many people found out very soon, when and where I spent time. Next day I was asked about it by several people. I’m not a spy and I don’t do any strange or illegal things in my life, but it seems very uncomfortable to me to be seen by unlimited amount of people…
    Another example is less funny. I was attending in the 3-days lasting barristers’ training. In the evening we had disco, and the manager of our chamber had to do some pictures to do have some documentation. Generally it is normal procedure, but he decided to put it on FB and forgot to ask people if they agree to use their pictures. As a result, my colleagues had problems with their wives, who saw them next day on FB, dancing with unknown women…
    So, I am sure there is not possible to avoid unwanted usage of our data. We cannot predict all the situations – that’s why I avoid FB as much as I can, at least for now. All the more so most of our data can be used for someone’s commercial purposes.

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  11. People usually have very strong opinions about facebook, but in the end of the day - they've agreed to its policy and invited it to their lives in the first place. Nowadays facebook is omnipresent and unless any major disturption occurs - it's position would be beyond of it's competitors like WhatsApp or Snapchat.

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  12. I like the sentence: if you’re not paying, you’re the product. It sounds horrifying that people are treated like products but in fact, this is how social media works. They have to earn money so they sell data an information generated by people. Today almost everyone is on Facebook, even if someone does not have an account, then his/her family or friends may post a photos or video with him/her even without permission. There is a lot of data about so many people that companies and others may use in many ways. On daily basis probably not too many people think about the safety of the data they share. Despite Facebook is very useful for connecting and communicating with people we should use Facebook and its application wisely and do not share everything we do with everyone.

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  13. In my honest opinion, Zuckerberg will fail long term. A lot of my friends are moving from Facebook to Snapchat and Instagram only. Facebook is bloated with advertisements and is far from being well made. I think that small applications with very specialized features will take over. There is a high chance as well that we will change our mind and ditch Facebook completely. Who knows?
    Facebook is a cheap alternative for commercial web pages or a decent event creator, nothing more. Messenger is far from being good and is behind snapchat.

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  14. Hello. I am aware that we are following the path / plan elaborated by facebook social media team. We visit our friends profiles to check how are they doing, but in the meantime we watch a lot of advertisements. I did not know that the Facebook has over 1.6 billion users, which use it at least once a month. It is amazing result that requires efficient code and powerful hardware that is working in a background.

    A lot of people talk a lot about privacy and “dirty tricks” like campaigns and so on… but they are still active Facebook users. A lot of them use Facebook to promote their services and wares. In my opinion it is powerful platform that collects and uses a lot of private data. Nevertheless if you do not like it - you do not have to use it.

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  15. I must admit thay I've already read similar articles. Facebook knows about us a lot more than we think he knows. The scary part is that we are giving those info with a smile on our faces. All that because they convinced us that we are receiving something for free. A lot of people learned very late that our personal data are the currency.
    The sad part of this situation is the fact that it is very hard to say "no" to all those services. Think about google, facebook and things like that. Even if we do not want to use them often we must because it is a good way to communicate or find things.
    I am sure that in future we will forget about countries as we understand them now, we will live in a reality created by corporations

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  16. I agree with the most of the previous opinions about privacy and collecting private/personal data by Facebook. It is a free of charge platform, which means that we have to give to this portal someting other than money. Personelly, I try not to post to much private information at my Facebook wall, but to be honest I use this website less and less. As Mateusz already wrote, a lot of people stopped using Facebook and switched to the Instagram or Snapchat, as fb some time ago began to be filled with advertising and marketing and looses its primary idea of connecting people.

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  17. Nowadays this is a little strange but I'm not a fan of social media. I have an account on fb and probably every month I spend 15 minutes on my precious time - I do not enjoy reading what other people do ... Working with a youngster I see how much time and commitment young people spend on social media, it is not good .. that's my opinion.

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  18. In a modern world, beginning of the era of artificial intelligence, data starts to be as valuable as money. No surprise then that many companies, not only facebook, base their business models on data gathering. And people should be aware that everything on this earth comes with a price, in this case the price is one's privacy. I, personally, do not want to pay this price, so I share very little photos and information on social media. I prefer face to face contact with my relatives and friends, or a phone call when it is not possible. But I don't find anything unethical in using peoples' willingness to share such data.

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  19. I agree with Dawid and Katarzyna. We are products. The funniest part is this that Facebook is not only company which gathers our personal data. People are saying that they don't user Facebook and Google because they don't want to share their data to those companies and after this words they going back to their Apple products which are collecting more data then you can imagine. I think that every company wants to rule the world not only Facebook. I don't know why people are getting so angry when ocassionaly they hear about sharing their data with other companies (if you register to new portal please read User Agreement). If you don't like it don't use it. Todays world of technology has got free alternatives to Facebook (ie Identi.ca), Twitter (Mastodon).
    We also need to know that Facebook puts a lot of money in their research, they are hiring one of the best AI scientist Yann LeCun (and many other of course), they are sharing their toolkits for free (sometimes they are much better then Googles). So we need to know that Facebook is not so bad of course they are gathering data, but many others companies also. As I said before if you don't like it don't use it. If you want to learn more about free operating systems and other stuff you can read some post made by Free Software Foundation and also you can listen to Richard Stallman lectures (phd).

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  21. The article could be much shorter, as most of the "shocking" facts are just obvious for me. I think they are obvious not only for me, not only for IT people, but for all the smarter ones ;)

    How can something be free? Nothing is free. And when you don't pay with the money, you pay with the personal data.

    Facebook switched from a simple "Like" button to reactions to learn more about people, to spy even better on them. This is just one of the examples.

    Their progress in AI for collecting the data is also just visible. At some point in time, you had to manually mark your colleague on your photo. Then, Facebook was able to mark people's faces automatically. And now not only it marks the faces, but assigns the correct people to them. Facebook just "knows" who is on the photo.

    Last, but not least, Facebook's vision is clear and well-known. It was officially presented e.g. here: https://images.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fcdn1.tnwcdn.com%2Fwp-content%2Fblogs.dir%2F1%2Ffiles%2F2016%2F04%2FFBF8RoadmapTNW.jpg&f=1. Moreover, all the companies from The Frightful Five a.k.a. FAAAM (Facebook, Alphabet - Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft) have more or less the same vision. And the paragraph about Snapchat can be extended. Facebook wasn't able to buy them, right, but current Instagram stories (I think this is the name of the feature) are almost the exact copy of the main Snapchat functionality. And as far as I know there are more users of Instagram stories than of Snapchat in general...

    "More than 1.6 billion people use Facebook at least once a month". Fortunately, I'm not in this group, I'm not an active user. Moreover, I don't use Google (https://duckduckgo.com/ works perfectly fine for me), I don't use Google Chrome, I don't own a smartphone, I don't play XBox. I just don't like being spy on :)

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  22. Hello;
    Very interesting article.
    I didn't realize that, as a man with no face book account, how deeply he interfered in my life. I thought I don't have an account, I don't have to worry about FB but it seems to be so easy.
    I think you can try to limit FB access to my life and I will continue to try to do so. Although I get the impression that it starts to be like fighting Don Quixote with windmills ...
    But ... why not try it? Why give up the trend of modern culture. Buy a phone without an Android operating system (NOKIA 6300 for example) and cut off the new technology ...
    Only if we inhabit the land of the 21st century will we be able to?

    I leave it unanswered.

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  23. I am not a user, so I can't give too much feedback on that. I used to use a Facebook-like social network, then I quit and requested my data to be removed. They outright refused, with some arrogant suggestions that I can take it to court. They argued they must protect personal information, also from my demands to delete it.

    Since then I don't engage much in social media, except for accepting or ignoring LinkedIn invitations from time to time. I still use many services that gather a lot of data (like banking, mobile telephony, e-mail).

    There is some hope with the Brave browser, Proton Mail, TOR etc. - I would like to try them all, but can't get to it. I think this is a moral question - to put the privacy back into the hands of people. The Free Software movement, as well as the Electronic Frontier Foundation are important beacons here.

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