And while you’re at it, stop answering Buzzfeed quizzes and customer service surveys, too. They’re all collecting your information:
It already knows whether you are single or dating, the first school you went to and whether you like or loathe Justin Bieber. But now Facebook, the world’s biggest social networking site, is facing a storm of protest after it revealed it had discovered how to make users feel happier or sadder with a few computer key strokes.
It has published details of a vast experiment in which it manipulated information posted on 689,000 users’ home pages and found it could make people feel more positive or negative through a process of “emotional contagion”.
In a study with academics from Cornell and the University of California, Facebook filtered users’ news feeds – the flow of comments, videos, pictures and web links posted by other people in their social network. One test reduced users’ exposure to their friends’ “positive emotional content”, resulting in fewer positive posts of their own. Another test reduced exposure to “negative emotional content” and the opposite happened.
The study concluded: “Emotions expressed by friends, via online social networks, influence our own moods, constituting, to our knowledge, the first experimental evidence for massive-scale emotional contagion via social networks.”
Lawyers, internet activists and politicians said this weekend that the mass experiment in emotional manipulation was “scandalous”, “spooky” and “disturbing”.
The Gestapo is alive and well in the United States only we call them Ad Men. Consumer sampling and surveys are everywhere. Some we know about and some we don’t. What the NSA does is unknown. We all need to get off the grid as much as is practicable. We also need to stop burning stuff like oil and coal.
It’s OK. I can’t afford most things being marketed to me, anyway…
Though I seldom respond to surveys, when I do decide to engage, I make it a point of answering questions in a very random and (hopefully) misleading manner. If these assholes insist on playing this game, then I’m going to play right back at them. I would advise anyone else to do exactly the same thing. The more that people respond in a deliberately misleading way, the less meaningful their data becomes. Yes, big numbers are required. However, we have to start somewhere. Fuck ’em.
Cynical? Me?
Christian Science Monitor is the only place I sometimes go (via links or google news searches) that makes me answer marketing questions.
But in the last few day, google chrome browser is now trying to force me to wait 30 seconds to open pages if I won’t pay for an app that prevents ads. Maybe someone has finally figured out that I never even notice most ads, and if I do, it’s because it was a nuisance and it made me feel negatively about the product advertized.
I guess it’s time to find another web browser.