“A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.”

-Mark Zuckerberg

Eli Periser talks about the consequences of an internet individually tailored by algorithms:

My friend’s dad gave me a heads up about another one of Facebook’s opt-out policies via his status update:

As of today [23 April 2010], there is a new privacy setting called “Instant Personalization” that shares data with non-facebook websites and it is automatically set to “Allow.” Go to Account>Privacy Settings>Applications and Websites and uncheck “Allow”. Mine was checked. Instant Personalization Select partners can personalize their features with my public information when I first arrive on their websites.

I’m too used to it to complain about it.  Facebook is a useful social tool.  I just want to make sure people know about things like this.

Screenshot:

Mark Keenan, Managing Director of Divorce-Online said: “I had heard from my staff that there were a lot of people saying they had found out things about their partners on Facebook and I decided to see how prevalent it was I was really surprised to see 20 per cent of all the petitions containing references to Facebook.

Source article

I just wanted to offer a shoot-from-the-hip reaction to the angle this article is clearly driving at. I think it is silly to come out with statistics like this. “Fueling” divorce? I wouldn’t be surprised to find that the rate of people citing “facebook” in divorce papers grew at the same rate of people signing up to use Facebook. Facebook is now a practically ubiquitous part of peoples lives, like driving a car and using a telephone. Neither of those cause infidelity, but they certainly get used in the process.

Writer Evan Ratliff Tried to Vanish: Here’s What Happened

I read this story today and had to share. Very interesting stuff if you have the time to read it.

I hit randomize for a Farmville character and got this. Thought it looked like Brad a little, what do you think?

CNN:

Meanwhile, the country’s powerful Revolutionary Guard — which enforces strict Islamic codes — said it will prosecute Web sites it accuses of inciting riots, adding to a ban on foreign media reporting on the protests and a block on Internet site such as Facebook or Twitter.

In response to this, I’ll remind all of you that we posted how to set up a proxy server for Iranians to access Twitter here.