User Profiling Quotes

When Facebook launched, it dove headfirst into a brave new world. No one knew that the cost of connecting people all over the world for ad revenue was eventually going to be Cambridge Analytica.

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.

When you use Facebook, you're always logged in, and your identity and relationships - to others, to content, to apps and services - are assets Facebook can use to customize your experience (oh, and your ads).

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.

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.

The 'old' Internet is shrinking and being replaced by walled gardens over which Google's crawlers can't climb. Sure, Google can crawl Facebook's 'public pages,' but those represent a tiny fraction of the 'pages' on Faceboo, and are not informed by the crucial signals of identity and relationship which give those pages meaning.

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

Your computer monitor is a kind a one-way mirror, reflecting your own interests while algorithmic observers watch what you click.

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

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

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.

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.

We use nearly 5 thousand different data points about you to craft and target a message. The data points are not just a representative model of you. The data points are about you, specifically.

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.

I wish I could tell you the recipe for figuring out who the target user is for your product and who your users should be, but... there isn't a recipe. It comes down to think really hard and use your judgement to figure out who you're really building this for.

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

It turns out that with Twitter data alone, we can go quite some way into figuring out someone's personality.

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.

Facebook has never been merely a social platform. Rather, it exploits our social interactions the way a Tupperware party does. Facebook does not exist to help us make friends, but to turn our network of connections, brand preferences and activities over time - our 'social graphs' - into money for others.

If you are interacting with anything on your phone or your computer, it is specifically designed to collect as much data about you as possible, so that that can then be monetized.

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.

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.

I think Facebook is an online directory for colleges... If I want to get information about you, I just go to TheFacebook, type in your name, and it hopefully pulls up all the information I'd care to know about you.

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

The hours Facebook users put into their profiles and lists and updates is the labor that Facebook then sells to the market researchers and advertisers it serves.