Cat People vs. Dog People

Re:Cat People vs. Dog People by honkhonkpants on Monday August 08, 2016 @06:54PM (#12251368)

This seems like quite an intrusion into people's private data. If certain other large companies decided to crawl all over your data for shits and giggles, I'm fairly sure HN would have its pitchforks out.

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Re:Cat People vs. Dog People by whateveracct on Monday August 08, 2016 @07:22PM (#12251489)

> To answer these questions, we dug our claws into aggregate, de-identified data from a sample of about 160,000 people in the United States who shared photos of cats or dogs (or both) on Facebook.

How is looking at aggregate, de-identified data an intrusion into people's private data? ?? ?

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Re:Cat People vs. Dog People by beefsack on Monday August 08, 2016 @08:07PM (#12251681)

This article is interesting, but it alludes to the level of profiling they do on their user-base, and that part is scary.

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Re:Cat People vs. Dog People by whateveracct on Wednesday August 10, 2016 @07:10PM (#12265331)

What is scary about using statistics on data your users knowingly give you?

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Re:Cat People vs. Dog People by asdfologist on Monday August 08, 2016 @07:09PM (#12251437)

What? This is orders of magnitude better than selling private data to ad companies, which is FB's main business. If of all things you choose to be outraged by aggregate statistics about cat vs. dog people, you may want to reconsider your priorities.

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Re:Cat People vs. Dog People by honkhonkpants on Monday August 08, 2016 @07:17PM (#12251463)

Is that what FB does? Or do they just use their data internally to target ads, without handing the data to the advertisers? I honestly don't know but I do know that people are always saying that Google sells your information to advertisers, and they don't. So I'm skeptical of this claim.

Anyway, maybe this whole analysis was based on public profile data.

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Re:Cat People vs. Dog People by saghm on Monday August 08, 2016 @08:28PM (#12251755)

In this case, I don't think the distinction is really that important; I think checking if someone is single or in a relationship to target them with an ad is more intrusive than checking if they're in a group of a few dozen thousand people who are single and like cats.

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Re:Cat People vs. Dog People by xanderstrike on Monday August 08, 2016 @08:05PM (#12251670)

If either of these companies actually sold the data they've collected they'd hurt their own competitive advantage.

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Re:Cat People vs. Dog People by exadeci on Monday August 08, 2016 @10:01PM (#12252087)

Ahah it's Facebook, what did you expect? They already sell your data and the new features like: Like/Love/HaHa Or tagging posts are just ways for them to know you better and show you relevant advertising or selling the data they have on you.

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Re:Cat People vs. Dog People by NeutronBoy on Monday August 08, 2016 @07:18PM (#12251472)

You'll probably find that they didn't use any data that's not available to 'public' viewing.

(Would be interesting to hear about their sampling methodology)

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Re:Cat People vs. Dog People by gwern on Monday August 08, 2016 @08:34PM (#12251775)

I'm not sure about that. The sentiment analysis in particular sounds like it might be using private updates.

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Re:Cat People vs. Dog People by justinlardinois on Monday August 08, 2016 @07:43PM (#12251569)

Ready your pitchforks!

https://www.google.com/trends/

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