Thursday, April 11, 2013

Facebook emoji: Status-update emoticons are bad for privacy, good for advertisers. [Slate]

You will be graphed
Facebook emoji: What are you doing?
“Facebook wants to know exactly what you're doing, and it wants you to explain it in a way that its computers can understand. Solution: cute emoji! […]
In theory, Facebook could try to derive the same information from your plain-English status updates by running them through natural-language processing algorithms. But turning informal, colloquial language into usable data is really hard. Even the smartest computers today are terrible at detecting irony, interpreting slang, or drawing inferences about people’s mental states based on their words. Google has some of its best minds working on that problem, and Facebook is clearly working on it too. But emoticons, along with hashtags, photo tags, "about" pages, and even the ubiquitous “like” button, appear to be part of a grand Facebook strategy to get its users to do a lot of the hard work themselves.”
Facebook emoji: Status-update emoticons are bad for privacy, good for advertisers.

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