How the Nexus 7 will revitalize Google+

Google+ has been around for a year now, and has managed to gain a reputation for being a virtual ghost town. Of course, the hardcore fans of Google’s social network will tell you differently, and Google itself revealed some impressive stats at last week’s Google I/O conference. Google also announced a suite of improvements toGoogle+, but that’s only part of the picture.

Take everything Google has done to make Google+ better, add in a great 7-inch tablet that sells for the low price of $200, and you have a recipe for the rebirth of Google+. The early Nexus 7 reviews are very favorable, and the device is so much cheaper than comparable tablets. The Kindle Fire is really the only similarly-priced competition, and the Nexus blows it out of the water. In other words, Google is probably going to sell a lot of Nexus 7 tablets.

Let’s say that the Nexus finds its way into the hands of a great many consumers. How does that make Google+ more compelling? First, Google has the option to preload your Google account on the device when you buy it. Just input your password, and you’re done. Android 4.1, like Ice Cream Sandwich before it, will ask you to sign up for Google+ if you don’t have an account. Because your main Google account is already synced, the device will know to pull in your contacts so you have an active G+ stream right away.

The social connections on Google+ might not be as strong as Facebook, but Google has reached 150 million active users. Engagement has also gone up; users are browsing Google+ for an average of 12 minutes each day. That’s not bad, and you don’t have to worry about your grandmother friending you on G+ yet. The Nexus 7 will get a lot of people (but probably not too many of your relatives) into the Google+ social sphere, but the changes that Google recently rolled out will make them want to come back.

The Google+ mobile app experience on phones and tablets, like the Nexus 7, is really amazing. It’s considerably better than any of the other social apps, which isn’t hard when you look at the mess Facebook is on every platform. Even if we ignore the state ofFacebook, the Google+ app is, objectively, an excellent app. The new interface has a magazine feel to it. You swipe through and big, beautiful preview images pop up. The animations are also buttery smooth.

At Google I/O, Mountain View took a swipe at Facebook by finally introducing Google+ Events. This is not just another event planning option — it integrates with Google Calendar perfectly. Unlike Facebook’s event planning, Google Calendar is something plenty of people actually want to use. Party Mode allows attendees of your event to automatically upload pictures during the time everything is scheduled to take place. Even better, people don’t have to be Google+ users to be invited. Everyone can participate, and maybe while they’re checking the event page, they notice how slick Google+ can be.

In that same vein, a recent change to Google Places makes more sense now. Place pages were replaced with Local Business pages on Google+ recently. Maps users too will find themselves drawn into Google+ where the other features might catch their eye.

These are the ways Google will get more users to check out Google+ in the wake of the Nexus 7 launch, but there are plenty of great mainstay features that will continue to prove sticky. For instance, there are video Hangouts, unlimited photo uploads, and even some solid image editing.

There are more people than ever on Google+, and when you actually add people to your circles, it’s a very engaging community. The Nexus 7 is going to bring new kinds of users into the fold, and that’s good for everyone. You should give Google+ another shot, if only so you can say you were using it before it was cool.

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What happens when you die?

For the last few thousand years, death has been a very simple matter. Upon death, your assets would be divvied up according to your will. Historically, assets were almost entirely physical — cars, houses, antique tables, jewellery, gold bullion, notebooks, photo albums — but today that couldn’t be further from the truth. Facebook, PayPal, WoW characters, source code, emails, Dropbox — when you die, your entire digital estate will disappear into the ether.

Many online services have policies in place that deal with death very neatly. Yahoo, Ebay, Blizzard, and LinkedIn, for example, will close and delete your account if proof of death is provided. PayPal will close your account, and if there are any funds in the account it will issue a check to the name of the account holder. At no point will your executor gain access to these accounts or any private messages therein.

Things get slightly messier with Twitter, which will provide a copy of all your public tweets and then close your account. When you report a death to Facebook, the account is “memorialized,” which prevents anyone from ever logging in to the account but allows friends to continue commenting. In both cases, again, no one gains access to any sensitive data or private messages.

Google and Microsoft, on the other hand, will furnish your heir with full access to your Gmail, Hotmail, and Google+ account upon your death. Your executor will need to provide a lot of details, including an official death certificate, and the review process can take a while, but ultimately your family will gain access to your complete email inbox and outbox.

In my case, assuming I live to 80 and Google doesn’t fold, this will mean that my children get access to more than 50 years of email — hundreds of thousands of email containing passwords, private communications, and a whole array of sensitive documents.

It gets worse

Services like Facebook and Hotmail are no-brainers — but what about other, smaller, more clandestine operations? If you committed an awesome piece of code to the Linux kernel on GitHub, how will you transfer ownership to your next of kin? What about the images you upload to Imgur? Or your comments on Reddit?

Just for a moment, think about all of the online services that you’ve signed up for, past and present. Forums, games, social networks, cloud storage, blogs, dating sites — when you die, all of that data will be lost. Your WoW characters, your Steam games, your university essays stored on some obscure cloud storage service — gone.

Digital legacy

And we’ve only discussed online services! What about the contents of your hard drive? Do they contain porn or other things that you’d rather your children didn’t see? Password protecting or encrypting your computer would seem wise in this case — but what if there are important files on your hard drive, such as bank details or your memoirs, that must be passed to your next of kin?

Are your documents/photos/videos organized in a sensible fashion? Have you told anyone where your backups are stored? Are there photos on your phone or tablet that need to be saved? Do you have any USB thumb drives or SD cards that need to be recovered?

In short, when you die, it will be such a pain in the ass for your family to track down and corral all of your assets that a lot of your digital legacy will probably be left to rot. Unless you make a digital will.

Dead man’s switch

I know it goes against every fiber of your being, but the only real way to make sure that your digital legacy remains in tact is to make a digital will. A digital will should include a list of all your login credentials — or at least the ones you want to share — and a layman’s description of all the data stored on your various devices. You should leave your digital will in a safe place, but it should not be part of your normal will, which will be made public after you die.

This doesn’t get around the problem of making sure no one gets access to your private documents and email, though. For that, the best solution is a dead man’s switch — a device that automatically triggers if you die. A dead man’s switch could scrub your hard drive of any sensitive data, and then email all of your passwords to your executor.

The problem with this approach, of course, is that you need to find a dead man’s switch that will outlive you. There are dozens of online services that will fire off posthumous emails — but most of them have been set up in just the last couple of years, and there’s absolutely no guarantee that these sites will still be around in 50 years when you die. Plus, do you really want to store the keys to your most valuable data on a single web service? These sites must be the ultimate honeypot for hackers, too. If you really want to use one of these sites, Parting Wishes is one of the oldest, and presumably one of the most reliable.

There are software solutions for wiping your hard drive if you don’t check in on a regular basis (i.e. you die), but it’s easier to just encrypt your hard drive with TrueCrypt — then, if you want your files to be accessed after death, just make sure you write your password down. It’s worth noting that TrueCrypt allows you to have multiple encrypted volumes, each one unlocked with a different password — so you can write down one password, but take the other volume to your grave.

Digital undertakers

Ultimately, though, the real issue is that digital property is not treated the same as physical property. Physical property is usually very well tracked, usually through documentation. Birth certificates, marriage certificates, credit agreements, vehicle registration papers — these all exist so that property, throughout its lifetime, can be easily tracked to its owner. When you die, a codified legal process makes sure that your will is executed. Death certificates are signed. Obituaries are written. Life insurance policies are paid out. Friends and family grieve.

Online, none of these formalized processes exist. When you die online, when your avatar passes on,nothing happens. This isn’t entirely surprising — after all, as far as Facebook is concerned, how can you programmatically differentiate death from a three-month sabbatical? — but it doesn’t mean that the situation can’t be improved.

Online services should implement their own, built-in dead man’s switches. If you don’t log into Facebook for three months, your account should be suspended; six months, and you’re memorialized. Gmail and Hotmail, instead of requiring a death certificate and lengthy review, could provide an “emergency contact” field that I could fill in — then, if the account goes inactive for a set period of time, the emergency contact would be sent a name and password. Perhaps I could flag one or two folders to be deleted before the emergency contact is given access, too.

Operating systems could have built-in dead switches, too. It would be easy for a desktop or laptop to initiate a self-destruct sequence if it isn’t turned on for three months. Likewise, when you set up a computer for the first time, it could ask you for an emergency contact. Modern OSes store the bulk of your data in the cloud — it would be very easy to give an emergency contact access to all of your documents and photos upon your death.

These changes need to be made sooner rather than later. It’s a morbid thought, but according to some estimates there are already millions of — literally — dead accounts on Facebook. It stands to reason that there are millions of dead Twitter, Flickr, and Match.com accounts, too. It will take many years, but unless digital death is taken seriously, the dead will eventually outstrip the living. Search will be cluttered with dead, unmaintained websites. Important documents and letters will remain forever buried in email accounts and cloud storage lockers. Digital photos that chronicle civilization’s most important achievements will be lost. Epic items in World of Warcraft will go unused. The world wide web will become the world wide graveyard.

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Internet-induced fear culture (or: Why Girls Around Me isn’t the problem)

Over the weekend, a story about an iPhone app captured the attention and ire of the tech world. Girls Around Me is a simple app that takes your location, and then queries Foursquare and Facebook’s location APIs to find any girls (or boys) that are geographically close. You’re then shown a map, powered by Google, with faces (pulled from Facebook profiles) pinned to it. Clicking a face lets you see more information about the person (again pulled from Facebook).

Ostensibly, you’re meant to use Girls About Me to help you decide which bar or nightclub you should visit, but of course the tech world — and even the mainstream media — is instead labeling it as a rapetastic example of the lack of privacy afforded by Facebook’s default settings. You see, Girls Around Me wasn’t hacking Foursquare or Facebook to get this information: It was using open APIs to access information that, by default, Facebook and Foursquare make public. This isn’t a new feature of either social network, of course, but Girls Around Me is just the perfect, creepy illustration of why some information — like your location — should be friends-only by default.

The problem with all of these apoplectic, spittle-drenched reports about Girls Around Me is that they assume the worst. They assume that people will use this app to prey on men and women. Theyassume that these people are all being hoodwinked by Facebook and Foursquare into sharing their location.

These reports don’t for one minute think that this is just a fun app — an app that most people will run once, laugh heartily (or a little nervously), and then never look at it again. These writers discount beyond all possible doubt that the app will be used for the forces of good, rather than evil. What if a group of guys wants to make sure that the bar they’re going to isn’t a sausage fest, or vice versa? (What’s the female equivalent of a sausage fest, anyway?) What if the girls or boys that share their location data want to be found?

In short, all of these reports are predicated on the assumption that we’re living in a world that is packed with rapists.

I hate to break it to you, but we’re not. The world is also not full of terrorists, or muggers, or people who will steal your children while they play in the yard.

While it’s certainly true that Girls Around Me could make it easier for a predator, and I agree that social networks need to tighten up their default privacy settings, these are merely symptoms of an underlying problem. We live in a culture of fear — and it’s all technology’s fault.

One of my favorite examples is society’s belief that the world we live in today is somehow less safe than X years ago. It’s not. Over time, crime has generally decreased. The worldwide life expectancy is now 67 years — at the turn of the 20th century, it was just 31. In the US, violent crimes are at a 40-year low. Child abductions are dropping. Worldwide, quality of life is increasing not decreasing; in the last 20 years alone, 2 billion more people have gained access to safe drinking water.

Yet here we are, living a life of fear. In just one British study, 13% of respondents thought they would be the victim of violent crime in the next 12 months — and yet the national violent crime rate is just 20 per 1,000, or 2%. Why? Because of technology.

High technology’s biggest strength is the near-instantaneous processing and dissemination of information. 200 years ago, you had to send a letter. 100 years ago, if you had access to a telegraph, you could send a short message around the world in a few minutes. Today, you can update your Facebook status, check in on Foursquare, or write a blog post at any time of day, from almost anywhere, instantly.

On the one hand, this is immensely empowering. The internet, and the free flow of information and ideas, is one of mankind’s greatest innovations, and probably one of the reasons for the worldwide decrease in crime — but it’s also the vehicle by which our culture of fear is perpetrated by governments and Big Media.

As computer networks have grown, so has the coverage of newspapers and news broadcasts. Prior to the arrival of wire news services in the 1950s, news coverage was almost entirely local. In those days, the only murders, rapes, or abductions that you heard about were local — and because violent crimes are incredibly rare, you only really heard about serial killers. Today, with world-spanning news agencies and communications networks, news coverage is global — and there’s always a murder happening somewhere. In all likelihood, reporting itself hasn’t really changed — the headlines of yesteryear were probably just as hyperbolic — but now, a news service has access to so much newsthat it can pick, choose, bias, and emphasize whatever it wishes for as long as it wants. If it wants to run a month of stories on (apparent) prevalence of child abuse, it can.

The sad fact is, gristly crime like murder or rape sells papers, even if it’s completely unrelated to the lives of the readers. If a news channel that survives purely on advertising revenue has to decide between an international politics story, or a story about an abducted child, it’s fairly obvious which one they’ll choose. Sex sells — sexy subjects sell.

We haven’t even mentioned the blogosphere, either, a terrifying realm where fact and fiction is conflated and misreported on a criminally massive scale. Depending on which blog you read, you can satisfy just about any conspiracy theory you fancy. Irrespective of whether it comes from a news site, chain email, blog, or meme, it’s almost impossible to surf the web without having to tread through falsified, inflated, or out of context news.

In other words, the world might be the safest it’s ever been, but when faced with a constant barrage of FUD from almost every news source, you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise. It is this fear that politicians then use to pass laws that destroy your civil liberties and march ever closer to a Big Brother state, or to justify war. It is this fear of the world itself – oh my God, there’s a murderer around every corner! — that makes you susceptible to more fear, in a horrible, noose-like negative feedback loop.

Fortunately, our biggest enemy in this case — the internet — is also our strongest ally. Sites like Wikipedia provide excellent, accessible analysis of the actual state of play, and many governments now do a good job of publicizing national crime and quality-of-life statistics. Read and watch the BBC, a public service broadcaster which is chartered with providing impartial, both-sides-of-the-coin news.

The main thing, though, is to remember that every journalist, blogger, news anchor, or media company wants to grab your attention in some way. Usually this is very easily done by appealing to your most basic fears, and by only telling you one side of the story. If everyone was wary of this, and proactively sought out the other half of the truth, we would suddenly see the modern world for what it truly is — an awesome, interconnected, global web of 7 billion people leading better lives than at any time throughout history.

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Hackers give Anonymous a taste of their own medicine

Considering Anonymous’ disparate nature,and no central authority calling the shots, it’s a surprise this group has not turned on each other already. Antivirus firm Symantec reports that associates of the group are finding themselves victims of denial-of-service software that has been infected by a Trojan horse.

In previous attacks, Anonymous hacktivists have shown an affinity for Slowloris, a simple tool for DDoSing websites. The group distributes this software through a how-to guide on Pastebin. On January 20, however, hackers broke into this document and changed the Slowloris download links to a modified version of the software infected with Zeus, a popular Trojan horse.

The infected client still works as expected, however behind the scenes it’s doing much more. Zeus steals passwords as well as other credentials including cookies. The link change occurred around the same time as the raid on Megaupload, Symantec says. Unless Anonymous checked the code behind the document, they would have never known anything changed.

It’s not clear how long the link has remained up, but the document has seen at least three major spikes in traffic. The guide was retweeted by the main Anonymous Twitter account in late January to 500,000 followers, just after the group retaliated the Megaupload indictment by DDoSing the RIAA and DoJ websites. There was also the DDoS campaign around the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement a few days later, and the DDoS protest against the Syrian government last month. This bad link has been around the block quite a few times.

What we’re learning here is that there’s a serious flaw in how Anonymous works. By being so amorphous and disparate, there is no control over the members of the group. Incidents like this can easily happen because there’s nobody watching the hen house, and Pastebin isn’t exactly the most secure way to distribute information. Anonymous now knows this, and anyone who has downloaded Slowloris through the group since then better check if they’re infected.

It is understandable that the group wishes to remain anonymous (excuse the pun), so it does not act as a single entity. But the right hand will never know what the left hand does in this group, so its highly doubtful this is the last time we’ll see hacker-on-hacker violence. Moral of the story here? DDoS at your own risk, or at least run some good antivirus software while you’re doing it.

As for who was behind the Pastebin hack in the first place, we may never know. The timing — January 20, just a day after the RIAA and DoJ DDoS — suggests that a federal agency might’ve been behind it, though.

Updated: It seems, just moments ago, that the leader of LulzSec, an Anonymous faction, has given up the rest of LulzSec’s leadership to the FBI.

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Samsung develops emotion-sensing smartphone

You are too angry to update Facebook, please try again later. Judging by an early prototype Samsung Galaxy S II developed by a wing of Samsung’s huge R&D group, your smartphone might soon block you from posting tweets and status updates, depending on your emotional state. Alternatively, instead of blocking you, a little emotional state emoticon could appear next to your tweet so that your followers can better understand your drunk/sad/angry/sleepy tweet.

The technology behind the emotion-sensing smartphone is surprisingly simple: It infers your state of mind from how you use your phone. By analyzing how fast you type, how much the phone shakes, how often you backspace mistakes, and how many special symbols are used, the special Galaxy S II can work out whether you’re angry, surprised, happy, sad, fearful, or disgusted, with an accuracy of 67.5%. The research paper isn’t available yet — Samsung is demonstrating its findings at the Consumer Communications & Networking Conference next week — but it’s fairly easy to see how an angry or fearful person’s hands might shake more (adrenaline), or how a happy person might use more special symbols (emoticons). Whether that 67.5% includes false positives or not, we’re not sure.

The first demonstration of the technology will be a Twitter client where each tweet is labeled with a symbol denoting the tweeter’s emotional state, but obviously the same tech could be used with email, SMS, Facebook, or any other messaging client. It wouldn’t be hard to pop up a dialog saying “You have written this message while shaking with apoplectic rage. Do you want to save this is a draft and revise it later?” too — kind of like the companion app for the Social Media Sobriety Test, which stops you from posting to Facebook if you’re drunk.

Emotion recognition is part of a larger school of computer science called “affective computing.” In essence, it deals with computer software that can measure, interpret, and react to your feelings. This might involve a brain-computer interface, or it might be entirely indirect, as with Samsung’s solution. Affective computing also deals with computer software that is sensitive to your emotions. Imagine Windows detecting that you are tired or angry, and thus making interface widgets larger and easier to click — or Left 4 Dead 3, where Valve’s AI Director slows down the horde of zombies when you’re actually feeling haggard. Of course, on the other end of the scale you have helper robots that can tell when you need a shoulder to cry on.

The problem with emotion recognition, though, just like most technologies that involve the brain, is that computers aren’t human. The only way that brain-computer interfaces work is through training — you think about moving a pointer upwards over and over, and eventually the software learns what your brain activity looks like when you’re thinking “up” — and it’s the same with Samsung’s emotion-sensing software. Before the custom Twitter app will label your tweets with smiley and angry faces, you have to go through a training period where you tell the phone how you’re feeling. The software then correlates your “angry” with your actions during that period (your typing speed, phone shakiness, etc.)

If you lie about your emotional state to begin with, the software is useless — and so really we come back to whether you want your emotional state to be transmitted with your tweets, or whether you prefer delicious, internetty ambiguity. Still, we shouldn’t be too critical: As a stepping stone to computers that can feel and react to our emotions, and considering how much our lives now revolve around smartphones, Samsung has made a very important discovery.

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What happens if Facebook shuts down?

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been steadily churning an idea over in my head: What would happen if Facebook died? What would the world be like if you woke up one day, rolled over to check your smartphone, and found that Facebook simply didn’t exist?

On an microscopic scale, you might’ve experienced something similar in the past, when it was quite common for your Facebook account to be inaccessible due to a bug or ongoing maintenance. It’s jarring to be disconnected from your friends, loved ones, and painstakingly fabricated digital ego — but you calm yourself with the knowledge that the outage is only temporary. On the other hand, though, you hear harrowing stories of people who have had their Facebook accounts banned (or Gmail accounts deleted), and how they have lost years of photos, memories, and messages. What would happen if you scaled this effect up to almost a billion people?

Would there be an outcry of monumental proportions, followed by some kind of pitchforked rush on Facebook HQ? Or would it be more like a veil being lifted from the collective consciousness, with a billion people blinkishly emerging into the Real World for the first time in years? I suspect it would be the former.

A better question to ask, though, is whether Facebook could actually be shut down. I don’t mean physically — Zuckerberg could obviously pull the plug at any time — but, more ideologically, is Facebook too large and important to fail? I mean, very few people would argue that the internet itself is a necessity of everyday life — some countries have even gone as far as declaring internet access to be a human right — and, more and more, Facebook is becoming the internet for many people. In 2011, Americans spent around 30% of their online time on social networks and blogs, with Facebook making up the vast majority of that. A further 10% of online time is spent playing games, most of which will have been Facebook-based Zynga games. In many respects, Facebook has become the spiritual successor to the AOL Browser, which for a large percentage of surfers — back in the ’90s, at least — was the internet.

Unlike AOL’s walled garden of yore, though, Facebook has weaseled its way into the very fabric of the web. If you shut down AOL at its peak, you would have a bunch of upset users, but they wouldn’t have actually lost anything except their email. If Facebook ceased to exist, you would lose messages, photos, friends, business connections, and a whole slew of other things. Just like when a hard disk dies, you would be forcibly separated from a large portion of your digital livelihood if Facebook closed.

One social network to rule them all?

The one saving grace, perhaps, is that Facebook isn’t the only viable social network in existence — but even then, just imagine waking up to a post-Facebook apocalypse, and trying to organize a mass migration to Google+ or LinkedIn. How do you contact 300 friends without Facebook? What if some friends go to Google+, others go to LinkedIn, and a few stragglers end up on Twitter — how on earth would you go about coordinating re-friendships? Then there’s all of your missing messages, wall posts, photos, Likes, Shares, check-ins, Pages, and whatever else Facebook ends up folding into its social monopoly. Really, if Facebook shuts down tomorrow, there’s no realistic way of recovering what we once had.

In many ways, it would be a lot like the crumbling of an empire. When the Roman Empire failed, the world didn’t cease to exist; and likewise, if Facebook shuts down, the internet would surely live on. This isn’t to say that Facepocalypse would be the same — the very fabric of society was torn to pieces when Rome failed — but the world would undoubtedly be very different. In much the same way that the Roman Empire shifted to become the Byzantine Empire, something would replace Facebook. It might even turn out, after the shake-up, that the New Facebook is actually better than the old. Put it another way, do you think the world would be shaped like it is today if we still had an imperialistic, militaristic czar that rushed around quelling any and all opposing nations? Hang on, disregard that.

A taste of the future

My musings were brought into sharp focus a few days ago when it was announced that Facebook, Google, and other internet bigwigs were considering a one-day shut down to protest against SOPA.

You see, believe it or not, we’ve never actually had a wide-scale internet blackout of a major internet service. In recent years, I don’t think Facebook or Google has ever been offline for more than a few minutes. Twitter has fits and spurts and growing pains, and email providers like Hotmail and Yahoo occasionally have minor outages — but in general, the internet in general and the world wide web in particular are very resilient. When it comes down to it, when was the last time that you couldn’t access a major service for more than a few minutes? If you can recall an occasion — I remember when I couldn’t access World of Warcraft for 24 hours — do you remember how it made you feel?

If most of the World Wide Web shut down for a day, what would it be like? Would it be like the Northeast Blackout of 2003, where everyone on the US Eastern seaboard took a well deserved break from real life and bumped uglies in the dark for a few days? Or would we all be good little scouts/brownies and spend the day writing SOPA letters of complaint to our congressman?

Of course, it could backfire completely. Maybe a one-day break from the internet is exactly what we, as a culture, need. Maybe, with the blinders removed, we can look back at our internet-saturated, internet-governed, internet-oriented lives and realize that there’s much more to life than SOPA and funny cat videos. Ha, who am I kidding. Viva la Facebook!

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The Facebook oracle

Although the exact split is unknown, it is widely believed that the vast majority of Facebook’s revenue — expected to be around $4 billion in 2011 — comes from targeted advertising. Just like Google, advertisers pay Facebook for ads that hit very specific topics and demographics, such as “male photographers under 25.” The interesting bit is how Google and Facebook collect their targeting data, though: Google uses tracking cookies to glean your surf and search habits, and thus make some fairly complex assertions about your interests, but Facebook has it easy: Through your profile, your friends, your shares, and your likes, youtell Facebook exactly what you’re interested in.

In short, the more information Facebook has about you, the tighter the targeting, the more money that ends up in Zuckerberg’s pocket. Almost the entirety of Facebook’s business model, then, hinges on how much data it can accrue about its users, and thus it should be no surprise — being a capitalistic corporation and all — that almost every Facebook feature collects or extracts yet more information about you. It has now got to the stage where, in printed form, Facebook stores hundreds of pages of your personal data.

In recent months, though, Facebook seems to have stepped things up a notch. Where providing data on Facebook used to be a very active experience — you clicked a Like button, or checked in from a restaurant — Facebook is now employing extensive image recognition, data mining, and machine learning algorithms to analyze your uploads and activities, hoping to find a link or tag that it can monetize.

You know that Facebook provides facial recognitionwhen you upload photos of your friends — and now it seems, it also does location recognition (pictured right). In this case, one Facebook engineer has gone on the record and said that the algorithm simply looks for the name of the location in the photo album (“Postcards from Zambia”), but there have been numerous reports of people saying that Facebook also suggests tags even whenno obvious data points exist. In all likelihood, Facebook is using a host of different signals to work out where an image was taken. Your IP address (which can accurately provide a geolocation), the EXIF data embedded in images (including GPS coordinates), and machine learning (is the image similar to one of Facebook’s billion other tagged images?), can all be used to derive the image’s location — and, significantly, these are techniques that the average user knows nothing about.

It doesn’t stop there, though. Did you know that the Facebook mobile apps log your location, irrespective of whether you publicly check in or not? If you link Rdio or Spotify to Facebook, they get your music listening habits, too. Both of these have been combined into a new feature called Suggested Events, which does exactly what you might think — it tells you when your favorite band is playing — but of course, Facebook can sell this as a targeted ad.

There is no spoon

Now, you’d be right in saying that you don’t have to accept Facebook’s facial or location recognition tags — you can even stick it to the man and really screw Facebook over by clicking “no, this is not Zambia” — but that really isn’t the point. If Facebook is making accurate guesses about the locations you visit or the events you attend, just imagine what kind of scary assumptions are being made behind your back. Google has a page that shows the inferences it has made about your surfing habits — but just imagine if Facebook had a similar page.

What if you say you’re married, but your wall and message interactions say otherwise? Could Facebook use that to sell targeted advertising to a marriage counseling company? What about income, religious beliefs, and mental health; what if your stated stance doesn’t jive with Facebook’s model of you? If Facebook notices that I’m depressed, should it show me ads for a suicide hotline? What if you claim to be heterosexual, but act homosexual enough that Facebook displays gay ads?

The scary truth is, Facebook is quickly supplanting Google as the digital oracle. Through its almost-ubiquitous Like buttons, which track you even if you don’t click them (and can regularly be found on porn sites, by the way!), Facebook knows an awful lot about your surfing habits. Through actual Likes and Shares, Facebook knows what products, brands, and events to foist upon you. Through Messages, Photos, Wall posts, and the games you play, Facebook can divine almost everything about your personality — and the personality of your friends and family, too. The only data that Facebook really misses is your search behavior, but even then it doesn’t really matter — with Facebook becoming more and more like the AOL Browser walled garden of yore, people are spending less and less time surfing the world wide web and more time poking their friends or checking theDoctor Who fan page.

The woman in the red dress

The flip side, of course — especially if you don’t mind the systematic destruction of your privacy — is that Facebook really can help you live a better life. Are you bored and looking for something to do? Well, Facebook has correlated your profile with a billion others and found that you’ll probably like scuba diving — here’s a sponsored ad for a local diving school. Is it worth seeing that blockbuster film? Well, judging by your negative sentiment for the five previous Johnny Depp-plays-an-oddball-protagonist films, Facebook thinks you should give it a miss.

Should I go out with that girl? How long should I spend playing this video game? What other HBO drama can possibly fill the gap left behind by The Wire? These are the kinds of questions that Zuckerberg will have tasked Facebook’s engineers with answering — and really, with the amount of information that they have, it’s not a matter of if they’ll find a solution, but when.

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How to Setup Facebook Ad Campaign for more Likes

“Facebook Like” is a trend nowadays, with the more number of likes a page/product/website has, the more branded it is called. It not just ends with Facebook likes but the upvoting in any social bookmarking and networking website, like the Stumbleupon stumbles, and Google +1 votes, Diggs, Delicious bookmarks etc. but when you are in a social network, the number of likes is one would try to show off on their web pages, and this shows how well the page is spread and liked by people globally. Just like the other services, Facebook too has the paid ad campaigns, using which you can bring in more “likes” for your webpages on Facebook. This ad campaigning is called the “Facebook Advertising“.

With the Facebook advertising feature you can set up ads, and have the Like option in the ads, and set them to pay Facebook only for the ads that are clicked, and the daily budgets can be set. Here is how you can setup the Facebook advertising campaigns of your Facebook page to bring in more Likes -

Go to Facebook Advertise page, and click on the “Create Ad” link. Then you would be taken to a page to Design Your Ad. Destination Page has to be selected, the type of ad (Facebook ad or Sponsored stories, what you usually see on the sidebar), setting the title for the ad, body with the text, image to be shown beside the text.

Next step is the targeting of audience, based on several factors. Facebook does the targeting based on the information shared in the profiles. For example, if you are promoting a page that is about reducing weight, it would suit the age group of 30+ to 50 years, you need to set the audience age target etc. and Facebook would show the ads to the users of that age range. You can target the ads to particular locations too, i.e. based on the countries. Facebook setup would give a rough estimation of how many target visitors would be seeing your ads, based on the targeting you have done. You can even target the people on their birthdays, and based on their relationship interests, and education info.

Once the setting up of the design and the targeting of audience is done, you need to review your Facebook ad units, and set the bid type, the Bid per click, and the daily budget.

After the reviewing is done, you need to confirm it and then add a funding source, either a credit card or from your Paypal account. Once you set that, the ad campaigns would automatically charge and cut the balance from your paypal based on the daily budget you have set and the amount spent.

Add your paypal account, and it gets confirmed in sometime, and the ad setting up completes. The ads would show up in the Facebook sidebar for the target audience.

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