1) discounts / promotions / contests and other forms of bribery

2) upcoming products you want to hear about as soon as they're ready

3) products you genuinely love and want your friends to know about

4) companies you support for ideological reasons (they support some charity/cause you like)

5) social signaling / status (mark yourself as an Apple customer, or a Coach bag owner, or whatever.)

6) the brand puts out genuinely entertaining advertising (some people really like the Old Spice "smell like a man" commercials)

Also: 99.9% of people who use Facebook don't think at all about how much information they're giving Facebook. They don't care. So Facebook knows I like Bob's Burgers but not The Family Guy. And?

This. While in general privacy is definitely a concern, I see "don't give your information" way too often and it's becoming sort of a cliche.

How might the fact that I like some certain artists affect me in the future? No one is going to blackmail me for the fact that I liked Wu Tang Clan. I won't get denied some visa or whatever because I liked Donnie Darko movie.

Privacy is important but let's stop from making it a cliche or some 'easy win'.

We do not, with respect to clean air and clean water, set the limits of tolerable pollution by consent. We have socially established standard of cleanliness, which everybody has to meet.

Environmental law is not law about consent. But with respect to privacy we have been allowed to fool ourselves.

What is actually a subject of environmental regulation has been sold to us as a mere matter of bilateral bargaining. The facts show this is completely untrue" -- Eben Moglen

In one scenario, you have full control over when you signal that information and when you stop. In the other, once you send out the signal... congratulations, you're now in several databases and have opened yourself to all sorts of soliciting.

Once it has been on the internet, it is forever.

Not saying you're wrong, but I don't think it is exactly the same.

Maybe tattoos?

If that were truly the case, we wouldn't be so worried about NSA retention of data.

If you commonly display $information in all sorts of settings, then $information is not ipso facto private and leaking that information further is not a privacy threat.

(Of course, it can be used as an input to deanonymize you in some data-mining system, so there's that...).

Constellations of consumer interests might be enough to create a high likelihood that you're gay, a drug user, sympathize with anti-tax protesters, or with anti-globalization protests. The next algorithm to be run over your profile might benefit greatly from this initial filtering, and depending on the distinctness of the constellation, may not result in very many false negatives.

The second algorithm auto-authorizes full text email and full audio telephone collection and review. </dystopia>

That does not mean we must treat every single personal preference as top secret material.

What if the FBI decides to categorize your band fandom as a form of gang affiliation?

http://edition.cnn.com/2014/01/08/showbiz/juggalo-gang-lawsu...

I feel like this could very much be a case of http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikaandersen/2012/03/23/true-fa...

US spending on science, space, and technology has a 0.992 correlation with suicides by hanging, strangulation and suffocation

Public interest is probably best served by making sure that lending markets are healthy enough that making meaningless distinctions based on silly data is not a viable practice (rather than fretting over exactly what data is allowed to be considered).

I see how they would know that you like Bob's Burgers, but how would they know that you dislike The Family Guy? Or, were you saying that they know you haven't declared you like Family Guy at this point in time? I ask is cause I was missing a way they could track the former, and also because I think Facebook is missing the boat by not having a way to dislike something.

If I were looking to by Brand A and saw a lot of my negative sentiment for that brand Brand B would need less positive sentiment for me to be sawed to it. In that scenario they start to displace services like Yelp.

I really want all ad platforms to give me the choice to opt out from some advertisers -- especially from alcohol and gambling.

Gmail, Google Search, Twitter, Facebook etc are all widely used.

There's a similar effect on Twitter with brands asking for retweets, but I see less of those, presumably because the kind of people I follow on Twitter are less likely to get sucked into that.

Either way I'm glad I have nothing to do with that sort of work anymore. Having quite a few friends in agencies I see the X likes Y posts all the time because they have to like a load of brands for their jobs. What a miserable waste of time.

I also follow Fox Soccer and ESPN FC because it's easier to have content pushed specific to my interests rather than go to espn.com and click on the soccer tab.

I follow businesses as my business because I want to build a profile. I also follow competitors and peers because I want to stay in the loop.

It's just a large RSS feed really.

The black-boxiness of the algorithm is non-ideal, but some algorithm is required.

This is a problem that Facebook has created, and one they will wrestle with until they either fix it and save their business, or are displaced by an upstart.

They do it because it's a way to socialize.

Also when you like a page, you will be following it. That is, you will see news from that brand's page on your news feed.

Facebook is constantly recommending to me things I should like. I ignore them all. I drink a Diet Coke from time to time, but I don't need the latest Diet Coke news.

I personally follow a few kiteboarding brands that publish great pictures that I enjoy having in my feed.

This assumes that giving Facebook information to deliver ads for things you actually want is a bad thing, a position I disagree with. No matter how hard I try, I will be advertised to. I'd prefer to get ads for things I might actually want than a return to the lowest common denominator ads of the past (which tend to be things like diploma mills, insurance, or payday loans).

A few brands that I have very high affinity towards: Crumpler, Nike, and Canon.

Maybe a subtle unconscious change about how one is thought of might possibly be a result? (I don't know, but I don't think I can rule it out as a possibility that could be desirable to some.)

Awesome.

Hey we're going to grab coffee next friday, you should come along!

IE I like GoPro on Facebook. Ultimately they want me to buy a $400 camera and all the accessories, but they also inspire me with images and photos to get me outdoors enjoying things I also love.

So...complicated thoughts are complicated.