The Guardians announced:
Powerpoint: Edward Tufte is against it, in general. Photograph: AlamyA burst of 8 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team
Facebook self-censorship: what happens to the posts you don't publish? >> Slate
We spend a lot of time thinking about what to post on Facebook. Should you argue that political point your high school friend made? Do your friends really want to see yet another photo of your cat (or baby)? Most of us have, at one time or another, started writing something and then, probably wisely, changed our minds.
Unfortunately, the code that powers Facebook still knows what you typed—even if you decide not to publish it. It turns out that the things you explicitly choose not to share aren't entirely private.
Facebook calls these unposted thoughts "self-censorship," and insights into how it collects these nonposts can be found in a recent paper written by two Facebookers. Sauvik Das, a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon and summer software engineer intern at Facebook, and Adam Kramer, a Facebook data scientist, have put online an article presenting their study of the self-censorship behaviour collected from 5 million English-speaking Facebook users. It reveals a lot about how Facebook monitors our unshared thoughts and what it thinks about them.
Update: the precise phrase in the paper is that the researchers checked whether five characters or more had been entered: "using this threshold allowed us to record only the
presence or absence of text entered, not the keystrokes or content." So Facebook doesn't strictly speaking know what you typed - only that you began to type it.
Title : Tech: Boot up: Facebook self-censorship, Tufte in brief, developer intention, and more
Description : The Guardians announced: Powerpoint: Edward Tufte is against it, in general. Photograph: AlamyA burst of 8 links for you to...