Thought you were safe on Facebook? Users may want to think twice about that. We already know that Google's motto of "don't be evil" is complete bullsh*t, as they use their online power to promote websites that side with their extreme liberal ideology and punish those who don't. But Facebook? They're supposed to be our friend! We post very personal photos and comments on that site! It turns out that as they gear up up for the 2012 presidential campaign and try to capitalize on the troves of data that can be sold to advertisers, Facebook is giving the liberal hack website Politico deep access to users' data to analyze political sentiments. This is the continuation of the trend where the line blurs between public and private information - and there is a line.
From All Things D:
Counting Twitter mentions would have you believe that Ron Paul is the most popular Republican candidate in the ongoing U.S. primaries. Umm, right.
But some social media analysis of politics is going beyond that. A partnership between Facebook and Politico announced today is one of the more far-reaching efforts. It will consist of sentiment analysis reports and voting-age user surveys, accompanied by stories by Politico reporters.
Most notably, the Facebook-Politico data set will include Facebook users’ private status messages and comments. While that may alarm some people, Facebook and Politico say the entire process is automated and no Facebook employees read the posts.
Rather, every post and comment — both public and private — by a U.S. user that mentions a presidential candidate’s name will be fed through a sentiment analysis tool that spits out anonymized measures of the general U.S. Facebook population.
This is similar to the way Google offers reports on search trends based on its users’ aggregate search activities.
This is the beginning of troubling alliances. Giving Politico access to users' political sentiments, anonymous or not, is wrong. They have a liberal agenda and, to be frank, we question how "anonymous" this data really is. We'd say the same if access was given to a conservative website. The Obama administration will stop at NOTHING to win re-election, which means their allies in Silicon Valley will be there to help.
Seriously, Facebook, Politico? Think twice before you post political comments on your wall. Or, just post about how pathetic Politico is.
Darrell Lect is a contributing editor for Habledash.
