Could Big Data Cripple Facebook
I read an interesting article that discussed how Big Data could cripple Facebook. It started by discussing a startup company called SmogFarm that has a product, KredStreet, that uses sentiment analysis on stocktwits. It measures reality vs past sentiment in order to determine accuracy and give rankings. This product holds people accountable for what they�ve said and predicted in the past. Imagine what happens when this kind of sentiment analysis is applied to Facebook.
Already, there is software out there that can get meaning out of seemingly useless data very easily. In the near future, people believe that employers can simply point some software at a prospective employee�s facebook profile and find out a lot of information about them without spending any time. The things that software could learn about a person are: work habits, failures, emotional issues, attitudes about authority, etc. There is also research to bake this up. Researchers at Cambridge University studied 58,000 people�s �likes� on Facebook. They were then able to build a model that was able to predict the following things: homosexuality in men (88%) and in women (75%), ethnic background (95%), gender (93%), religious affiliations (82%), political affiliations (85%), use of addictive substances (75%), and relationship status (67%).
Once people realize that this can be done easily, people will stop sharing so much information on Facebook, and other social media, according to Evans. Zuckerberg�s Law is that every year the amount of information people share on the Internet doubles. Will this hold true after people realize that potential employers can learn a lot more about them than they ever thought?
I agree that once people realize the implications of their social media use some will change how they use it. However, adults tell high school and college kids all of the time to be careful what they post on the Internet because you can never take it back. Students are warned of how employers can use what you post on social media to make decisions about you as a potential employee. Yet, if you take a look at a lot students� facebook profiles, it appears as if they had never been warned. Teenagers and young adults think that bad things won�t happen to them, they are invincible.
Now, once there actually are repercussions to people for what they post on Facebook, they might change how they use it. I don�t think people will stop using it though. According to a recent study, the average American spends around 8 hours a month on Facebook alone. That is a whole workday�s worth of time on one social media site. People aren�t just doing to magically stop using it because it�s possible for people to know more about them than they would like. I think that some people will stop or dramatically change how they use it, but I think the majority of people will continue to use it how they are now.
Sources:
http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/30/big-data-could-cripple-facebook/
http://memeburn.com/2013/03/when-big-data-gets-scary-using-facebook-likes-to-reveal-everything-about-you/
http://mashable.com/2011/09/30/wasting-time-on-facebook/
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