Couple things.

I think it is pretty cool that a college social network has morphed into a horrifyingly privacy invading intelligience company just as much ad the next guy, but seriously WTF?

I assume there is a good reason they are using drones? The deep learning of satellite data was interesting, but why is it neccessary?

Assuming you just use planet labs or something similar to get data and you process it, you find the people. Makes sense. Except in the case that these people regularly migrate as nomadic beduins i guess you could serve your popup drone fleet at them as bushpeople don't have adblock.

But if they are just poor people who are trying to get by and live, to the extent possible, like many other people, I don't get it. Surely you have a chicken and an egg problem here, right?

They either have running water and some semblance of infrastructure like roads and power, or they don't. Unless Matk is going to airdrop a fission reactor wouldnt have been easier to ask thr power company or trace the lines?

Second thing. Why not towers, or just paying for LEO sattelite nets?

Don't get it, but I guesz it one ups self calibrating loon baloons...

> They either have running water and some semblance of infrastructure like roads and power, or they don't.

That really doesn't apply to subsistence farming communities, for example in sub-Saharan Africa. Population will be much more dispersed than in more urbanised developed countries. You can have tiny farmsteads with a dozen people every 100 yards covering thousands of miles of apparently rural land. Connecting mains water or electricity is impossibly expensive, but cell phones can still be widely used though communal charging.

A friend of mine helped out in Uganda and you are correct. If India, or wherever they are targeting is similar they will have limited electricity and limited clean water.

It was my understanding that the village my friend worked at had a rationed power supply for the wotkers and medical clinic that was run by a generator.

Do this is my point. Literally providing access to water with a hole and pneumatics was such an improvement in quality of life I am not sure what the usecase for this is.

* complicated totally foreign technology

* lack of charging ability

* likelyhood of downloading the cracked screen app is pretty high.

* using low cost satelites and repeaters has to make more sense.

So I am not sure what communal charging is, but if it is a crank box or generator, In the hypothetical we have just invented it would almost certainly be cheaper (but way less sexier) to just build low cost suburban housing like the hexayurt and provide education and technology from existing infrastructure.

How Silicon Valley is a distributed drone based LAN that provides a hookup app to people starving in the bush, or in the sluns of India.

The tech is intellectually stimulating, it is one if the main usecases for Planet Labs Api, but maybe im missing something, but how does this make sense.

Also, how does this operate in production, these things fly around and then link to eacjother and towers recharging several times a day?

Those are real questions. What is the application and ehat does the implementation look like?

At the risk of being gauche...

If the main benefit of Facebook is advertising, why bother extending functionality to people who are too poor to buy anything?

I presume it will be targeted advertising.

But I don't know what the end goal is. Both the target market and the target publishers are a mystery so far as I can tell.

Perhaps government or regieme campaigns will be the main buyer of advertisements to such detatched communities. I wonder what the cost per conversion is for rural votes?

I could see how this might be cool for concerts or for news (figure out where everyone is looking at) or for herding cattle. I think it is a bit weird tracking people's normal activities.

A guy on Reddit yesterday posted about going to the mall and going into a makeup store with his girlfriend and later receiving ads for the same store in his Facebook feed. I'm not sure if he connected to the store's wifi or not, but still very creepy.

Doesn't really matter if he connected to the WiFi: even just having WiFi enabled/turned on means that you should assume every store that you enter knows that you're there, and every other retail store also knows (that you're inside a competitor's store).

There are a number of startups providing these services (some of them have gone through YC I think?). It's now so common that you just have to assume that if your phone is broadcasting anything at all, including looking for a WiFi network to join, that your location is being tracked and sold for competitive analysis by corporations.

Unless there's techniques I'm unaware of, I assume you're talking about MAC address-based tracking? Apple has been working to eliminate that; they've been using randomized addresses during scanning since iOS 8.

The other possibility here is tracking via geolocation or iBeacon, which require an app with location services/bluetooth enabled. And in those cases the tracking is most likely based on Apple IDFA/Google Advertising Id, so you at least have the option to opt out: https://dev.twitter.com/mopub/ui/opting-out-interest-based-a... (assuming the app properly respects the setting).

How much does airplane mode affect this? I have it turned on constantly when I'm out. Mostly to avoid distractions.

Do we know for sure it's working: does that information lead to more sales ?

It's generally understood that it's quite effective to advertise to prior customers compared to say, targeting a geographic area.

Apparently it's about as effective as search ads: http://venturebeat.com/2014/12/16/90-of-marketers-say-retarg...

Yes, this is made possible by WiFi probe requests, which broadcast your MAC address and previously associated access points.

Dont even need to connect. Simply need to find the hardware uid and it can make the connection

Don't have a facebook account, problem solved. They can track you, but they can not make you look at their ads. Ad dollar dry up, so does the incentive to track you.

Better yet don't go to stores that employ this sort of thing.

Chances are good that you have a dozen other apps logging your location as invasive as Facebook is, and those ones participate in the same data exchanges that Facebook does.

There's a strong network of trackers both in the digital space and now the meat space, so the cards are pretty much stacked against you.

When my Nexus 4 eventually dies I'm going to replace it with a dumb phone.

I realised the other day that I use it for the internet about once a week since I'm either at home, work or out doing something where a phone isn't an option (cycling, swimming etc).

>Outside of that, found a social movement that shuns this sort of thing. At the end of the day we are apes that have been herded into these systems without any choice. The only thing to do about it is organize yourself into a group and fight for the reality that you want by shutting out mass society which is out to know everything about you to sell you stuff.

The same could be criticism for most social contracts, and there are groups like the Mennonites who live happy lives with levels of technology they deem fit.

Edit: Why did you edit your comment?

Felt it was too out there.

Facebook still delivers ads on their platform sites, and links your browser (not just cookies) to your identity. FWIW, Google isn't that much different

If my job was how to craft national security policy in the face of asymmetrical warfare, I wouldn't be sleeping much anymore.

Self driving cars? Bad enough.

Self targeting drone swarms...?

'Prepping' just seems one tiny notch more rational.

Quite an interesting approach to mapping, and it sounds pretty useful for the intended purpose. Conversely, I'm in the 'Lazlo Hollyfeld' boat of wondering what the purpose might be for the actual goals of Facebook, which isn't connectivity and internet altruism, but generating revenue. In this regard, I wonder what comes next, because looking at evidence of human activity will probably relay more rural and dirt-poor settlements than ones with disposable 'leisure time' and monies.

Why would you use drones instead of a one-time mesh network install that is solar+wind powered with long term lithium battery backup?

One of these could be powered for a month off a shoebox sized battery:

https://wiki.hackerspace.pl/projects:zsun-wifi-card-reader

Now mesh network them every few hundred feet.

Speed and latency, probably. They also probably think 1 UAV will be more reliable and easy to service than 100+ base stations.

I think I'm starting to get tired of "AI". We might as well call it "computer magic".

http://imgur.com/WNP6O3o or, like, GFY and I'll go read everything else on the internet that isn't pay-walled.

I'm getting the same ad blocker screen, but the thing is, I'm not running an ad blocker.

Not sure how Wired's ad-blocker-detector works. I am on the campus of a large company that uses a shared proxy for outbound internet. If that's triggering the screen, that seems bad for Wired.

Hilariously, I am using a blocker (uBlock origin) and get no suck message.

I use Ghostery, fwiw.

Enabling Adobe Tag Manager made the popup go away for me.

Is asking you to disable your ad blocker really paywalled?

To add another data point, I have uBlock Origin installed and turned on, and can see the site just fine.