John Battelle Quotes

Google is omniscient of what people search for and do. Facebook has over a billion subscribers, meaning Mark Zuckerberg has personal information about one in every seven people on Earth. U.S.A., Brazil, Mexico, India and Indonesia are at the top of that list.

You can go to Pinterest, and they'll get to know who your friends are, but they don't get to know very much about what you've done in the past. They're starting with little information about you, and they have to do this personalization.

When advertising is involved, you, the user, are the product.

Everyone and his Big Brother wants to log your browsing habits, the better to build a profile of who you are and how you live your life - online and off. Search engine companies offer a benefit in return: more relevant search results. The more they know about you, the better they can tailor information to your needs.

The liberation children experience when they discover the Internet is quickly counteracted by the lure of e-commerce web sites, which are customized to each individual user's psychological profile in order to maximize their effectiveness.

Facebook and Google are battling over who will be our gateway to the rest of the Internet through 'like' buttons and universal logins - giving them huge power over our online identities and activities.

The more Zuckerberg knows about you, the more media he will be able to bring you.

Every time you log in to Facebook, every time you click on your News Feed, every time you Like a photo, every time you send anything via Messenger, you add another data point to the galaxy they already have regarding you and your behavior.

We get better search results and we see more appropriate advertising when we let Google know who we are.

People say Facebook connects the world. Facebook has 5,000 Ph.D.s that think about how to make you click on ads you don't want to see. Their business model is about something that most people would not perceive as making the world better.

When you sign up for Facebook, the service first searches for any mentions of your name and suggests you befriend anyone who has mentioned you in their posts. It then asks to access your e-mail account so you can connect with anyone with whom you regularly correspond.

For the most part, cookies aren't dangerous. They were created so advertisers could get a better idea of who you are and what you're interested in, so they could send you ads you're more likely to find relevant.

Serving up ads based on behavioral targeting can itself be an invasion of privacy, especially when the information used is personal.

By now, we all know that our every move online can be tracked and traced, and that, ideally, services learn from and adapt to customers based on an artful deployment of that data.

No entity in the history of the world has collected more information about you than Google. My office wants to know what exactly Google does with all of the information it's gathering.

Ideally, Facebook would take all our clicks and information and would magically give us everything we want, without us even knowing we want it.

If you have a weakness for furry slippers or something, you might end up with that kind of advertising. It's a very complicated algorithmic decision. There's no one dude who's deciding what ads are going with things, and it's very individualized also. And that's the idea of collecting information is that in theory, you're showing people things that they should want to see or for which they are a good target. So, no, there's no master person.

Facebook is by far the largest of these social networking sites, and starting with its ill-fated Beacon service, privacy concerns have more than once been raised about how the ubiquitous social networking site handles its user data.

You happily give Facebook terabytes of structured data about yourself, content with the implicit tradeoff that Facebook is going to give you a social service that makes your life better.

The launch of Google+ apps sends a powerful signal - the personalized web has begun. What this means is that the way information is structured and accessed will turn on the individual, or rather their personal profile which is a composite of all the data collected on the basis of what they have searched for and shared.

Facebook is not your friend, it is a surveillance engine.

Facebook's the real deal. Nobody can buy Facebook now. Everybody has taken an angle at it. But Facebook may be the place that organizes everybody's personal information. It's got a very good chance of being that.

Google, Facebook, and other consumer web companies violate our privacy. But that's only because they have an ad-based business model. They can only make money by selling your data - and degrading the product experience with ads.

Supercookies are legal, but I don't think they should be.

We Facebook users have been building a treasure lode of big data that government and corporate researchers have been mining to predict and influence what we buy and for whom we vote. We have been handing over to them vast quantities of information about ourselves and our friends, loved ones and acquaintances.