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When You Fall in Love, This Is What Facebook Sees
- primitivesuave 13y agoA couple years ago, when I was still on Facebook, I got in this big fight with my girlfriend. I unfriended her on Facebook as a childish act of vengeance, and I noticed that the ads on the side suddenly turned into ads for dating websites. Maybe it was just me, but from the looks of it, Facebook thought I had broken up with my significant other and was targeting ads based on this assumption. It was then that I realized that every inference they make about you means big business. It means they can now target ads specific to your relationship tendencies on Valentines day, her birthday, his birthday, on your anniversary date, and so on. They can also pick up on events like break-ups and target ads toward you even then. Just another manifestation of Big Data.
- jsemrau 13y agoBy Big Data, you surely mean Big Brother ...? Must be me, but this level of data mining was for me the reason to leave.
- Aloha 13y agoI'd rather have ads that might be relevant than ones that are not. This stuff can be done while keeping peoples privacy intact.
- twelvechairs 13y agono it can't. Not unless 'privacy intact' means "people with access to the database will never use it for unintended purposes and it is completely secure from being broken into" both of which can't happen.
- 001sky 13y agoI'd rather have ads that might be relevant than ones that are not. This is preposterous. You would rather be manipulated better? Seriously... This is not a teneble position. Most people would prefer white noise. What you are espousing are simply the talking points of the advertsing indusrty. This is like a congressman thanking the lobbyist for "educating" him on the issues.
- rescripting 13y agoYou're missing his argument completely, which is that targeted advertising has upsides for both the advertiser and the consumer. While I prefer no ads over ads, given the choice I'd prefer relevant ads vs random ads. That being said targeted advertising infringes on your privacy. Rail against it for that reason. Don't make false assertions that people would prefer random advertising than advertising that they may actually be able to use.
- oafitupa 13y agoHe understood his argument just fine.
- d0mine 13y agoYou are assuming a benevolent advertiser that uses knowledge about you in a way that is aligned with your long-term interests. If we assume that a white noise advertising is less effective than a targeted advertising then it is in the interest of most people to prefer the former because a benevolent advertiser is a rare bird in real life.
- Houshalter 13y agoWhat he is saying is that advertisements manipulate you (likely without your knowledge) and that this is a net cost the the consumer (not to mention even dirtier ads for scams and malware, that's a different subject.) The other kinds of advertisement, the ones that actually inform you of something that is useful to you, do exist. But how much of a benefit are they? I don't think I've ever clicked on an internet ad or bought something because of one.
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- justinpombrio 13y agoWait, if you broke up with someone a few days ago and are now seeing dating ads, how could your privacy have been kept intact? This implies that an ad network has knowledge about your love life.
- jsmeaton 13y agoThe assumption is that you've changed your relationship status, and that's how they know you're now single. Telling Facebook that you're single, and them using that information to present an ad for a dating website is not an abuse of private information. You've freely given a first party some information, and they've used that information to display an ad from a 3rd party. There is no abuse of privacy here.
- saurik 13y agoWhat I find most fascinating about these kinds of situations is that it isn't clear that Facebook even "knows" this information, despite taking advantage of the "knowledge": they have a massive statistical inference system that notices certain kinds of events cluster with certain kinds of behaviors, leading to differing reactions to potential advertisements; so, while the website clearly has learned something about you, and if it were sentient might be able to have a really scary conversation with you, past asking the question "show me users who are likely to click on dating ads today" (which is a sufficiently different question as to require its own inferences and leading to its own errors) a developer at Facebook might not have "access" to this knowledge any more than a brain surgeon can use your brain to figure out who your mother is. In fact, these data scientists working their way through the data themselves are only now "discovering" something their ad engine already "understood" a long time ago, and while them knowing it explicitly might help them improve the UI of their website, it likely won't help their ad optimizer as the optimizer might already be "smarter" than they are.
- primitivesuave 13y agoThank you for the very illustrative explanation. It's fascinating to think about how smart the ad optimization will be after another decade, after the size of the training data set gets exponentially larger and the algorithms become more and more refined.
- noonespecial 13y agoIts starting to sound an awful lot like when skynet wakes up it won't be a terrifying overlord, but rather like a crazy old lady that no one really understands who sells kitsch and loves cats.
- xerophtye 13y agoInteresting point. it's not necessary that these behaviors are specifically programmed into the ad engine, rather it might have learned them on its own from the enormous amount of data it has.
- Symmetry 13y agoThe even more interesting thing is the extent that human beings can do the same thing.
- higherpurpose 13y agoAnd yet Facebook ads don't seem to be that effective - certainly nowhere near where Adsense ads are, which appear because the user would be looking for dating sites, as in your case.
- reddit_clone 13y agoYep. Targeted FB Ads merely seem creepy. The moment I break up with my girlfriend if someone shoves an Ad on my face for a dating site, I would find it very irritating.
- panacea 13y agoIt's tone-deaf.
- silencio 13y agoThe first Facebook page I saw immediately after marking myself as "engaged" started showing me wedding related ads, and I fully expect "married" in a month will mean ads for home buying and baby clothes. It was a nice change from "we want smart, educated Asian women to donate eggs for $10k+" though.
- joyeuse6701 13y agoI would have loved to have the ads "we want smart educated black men to donate sperm for XXX", then again, this might be one of those, 'careful what you wish for, you just might get it' sort of things.
- icambron 13y agoThe internet seems so much less sinister when you block ads.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- patio11 13y agoFacebook has a policy where you must target dating-related ads to people who are not in a relationship. See: https://www.facebook.com/help/143949649021372 https://www.facebook.com/help/143949649021372 What you're experiencing post-breakup is merely Facebook normal mode, which your girlfriend was protecting you from. (I'm aware of the targeting rule due to work on Internet advertising and aware of Facebook normal mode due to being a single 20-something male for the majority of my Facebook history.) There's nobody at Facebook who said "Single? Hit him with all the dating ads!", it's an emergent consequence of that policy rule, auction-esque mechanisms for ad placement, and the measurable behavior of most people demographically similar to you, which is that they click on cleavage but buy virtually nothing as a result of Facebook ads.
- goblin89 13y agoThat's interesting. Still, it doesn't sound too unlikely if Facebook allowed targeting ads to those who just broke up. For example, when you target your Facebook ad you can pick those who have just traveled somewhere, or even “intenders”—those, I assume, who only think about traveling. You can also target your ads to people in long-distance relationships already. There seems to be no way to specify that explicitly in your Facebook profile, and yet Facebook provides the category for advertisers.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- jchendy 13y agoThat's pretty interesting. Any idea why the dating sites can't target both men and women? > The "Sex" targeting parameter must be set to either "Men" or "Women" and cannot be both
- krcz 13y agoWhy do they disallow targetting people in open relationships?
- billyjobob 13y agoIf Facebook can predict when a relationship is due to begin, why not just set the relationship status automatically? They must be doing this internally even if they don't display it. Or how about they notify all your friends: "John is sharing 1.65 posts/day with Janet but only 1.32 posts/day with his girlfriend Jane. Click here to suggest he dumps Jane and starts a new relationship with Janet."
- gamegoblin 13y agoI wonder how much fuzzy logic they keep behind the scenes. e.g. John is p=.95 in a relationship with Jane, and p=.1 relationship with Jill, and negligible for all others.
- gibybo 13y agoI suspect the statistical confidence is very low for any given individual and only strong when you look at large groups.
- D_Alex 13y agoYeah! What could possibly go wrong with that?
- NamTaf 13y agoThat's undoubtably their end goal. Even if it's not made public, they would then use it to target ads. Basically, if they can accurately predict human behaviours before the humans can, they can target the ads at the most effective point in time.
- einhverfr 13y agoThe question is, what can security agencies do with this information?
- batiudrami 13y agoReminds me of that story of Target sending marketing material to a pregnant teenage girl before her father knew. http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targe...
- spodek 13y agoI can't help but compare the second plot in the story, which plots "Positive emotions level" by time, to my passion-attraction model, which plots the same -- http://joshuaspodek.com/visual-model-understand-passion http://joshuaspodek.com/visual-model-understand-passion. Mine is just for fun, or rather just to speculate on something interesting from a geeky perspective to see what that perspective reveals about ourselves. Soon after making it I saw a plot some guy made of the number of texts between him and his girlfriend that vaguely resembled my plots. The Facebook plot doesn't continue to a relationship's decline, so it can't compare completely, but it does suggest we can quantify some interesting patterns and see what they reveal about us. If there's anything most of us would like, it's to understand our passions and attractions to improve these emotions and the relationships they lead to. It would be sad if the only entities using the data were companies that sell ads like Facebook and Google, and not ourselves. Also, if you like data analysis like this on relationships, be sure to check out Okcupid's Oktrends -- http://blog.okcupid.com http://blog.okcupid.com.
- normloman 13y agoWhere exactly do you derive your passion / attraction model from? Where's the data supporting this? I must confess, I haven't finished your article yet. But I don't see any hard data besides the aforementioned text messages... a single data point.
- benched 13y agoI think a lot of people would have no problem predicting this pattern without looking at any Facebook data. Likewise, the participants and their more observant friends surely know that a relationship is likely to happen well before it becomes official. Relationships mostly follow the same course. I guess it's mildly interesting to actually see it in a more concrete form.
- dionidium 13y agoI'd like to see a graph of my own personal interactions with each of my FB friends over time. Obviously, I already know what this graph would look like, but it'd be pretty neat (and maybe a little sad) to see my failed relationships juxtaposed with the ones that have lasted.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- solidsnack9000 13y ago1.53 and 1.67 doesn't seem like a big difference.
- jordsmi 13y agoI was thinking this. The graph looks nice until you look at the numbers on the left. I guess it is a change but that is still just posting 1-2 times on the wall per day.
- sousousou 13y agoMaybe this is something that is visible on a large scale but appears more or less random when zoomed in to a particular couple.
- jmount 13y agoI would guess you are correct: that the signal is pretty weak per individual couple (to the point of not being usable) but shows up with this nice tight graph when you aggregate data.
- bigfoot13442 13y agoGiven that the number of posts dips over time, that's a difference of approx 8-10 posts in that 85 day period after the relationship begins. Seems pretty negligible.
- mbateman 13y agoWhat exactly are those data points? I doubt they are individuals, they wouldn't wrap so tightly around the curve around such a tiny scale (between 1.5 and 1.7 timeline posts per day). This looks like a very small effect but one with a very distinct form so I'd be curious to see the details.
- ottocoder 13y agoI was thinking along the same lines. With millions of users, I suppose it makes sense that you can see "average" number of posts per day change when a relationship changes, but at the individual level how could the algorithm tell if it is a change in relationship or somebody was having a good week and felt like being chatty (of course these options aren't mutually exclusive! :) ).
- eamsen 13y agoExactly my thoughts and I don't see a reasonable person/group filter to construct averages without introducing some kind of bias. And with the graph's axis starting at a non-zero value, I'm not convinced that the goal was to provide an objective view on the effects of relationships. More details would help to reduce the skepticism.
- pistle 13y agoSo, if you share more than 1 post in your timeline... POKE - it's on. And the day after POKE, you're ~~~ha-pp-i-er~~~. They have macro data which is interesting, but yeah, the utility of this for individuals? It's Complicated Facebook. Fire some data "scientists." Especially any that came from OK Cupid's marketing department. If you grant Amazon access to your timeline, they will pre-deliver love-dove gifts to your poke-ee before you even know to order them.
- Aloha 13y agoThis is both creepy, and really cool.
- brazzy 13y agoUnless you look at the actual numbers and realize it means absolutely nothing for individual people.
- hawkharris 13y agoWe might be missing the point here by focusing on romantic relationships. The fact that people make fewer posts on Facebook as they become closer might mean something, in general, about the kinds of relationships that Facebook sustains. Facebook is the modern equivalent of a Christmas card...It's a way of maintaining surface-level contact with many people: letting them know that you care...but you don't necessarily care enough to catch up through a more direct and personal medium. Communicating with your closest friends or your partner mainly through a Christmas card would be silly, in my opinion; we tend to choose less distant methods of communication. So, it's not surprising that people would exchange fewer posts with close friends, as well as romantic partners, as they get to know them. Those are just my two cents, speaking from experience and observation. I'm sure HN has a range of opinions about this, and I'm interested in hearing other people's perspectives.
- dionidium 13y agoI post things to the walls of close friends fairly often, because I know them well enough to know what they'll find interesting. Also, this completely breaks down if you include private messages.
- JumpCrisscross 13y agoI think the sociological term you are looking for is "weak ties" [1] - Facebook (minus Messenger) appears to be a platform for weak ties more than strong. There are social, strategic, financial, and political benefits to maintaining a network of weak ties [2]. [1] https://www.stanford.edu/dept/soc/people/mgranovetter/documents/granstrengthweakties.pdf https://www.stanford.edu/dept/soc/people/mgranovetter/docume... [2] http://personal.stevens.edu/~ysakamot/BIA658/man/week4/burt.pdf http://personal.stevens.edu/~ysakamot/BIA658/man/week4/burt....
- makmanalp 13y agoThis is actually something that's been on my mind recently. If I keep my facebook messages with my girlfriend for posterity (like older people today kept their letters), I wonder if we'll be judged as a shallow couple with nothing to talk about other than daily events. It's just not conducive to much else. In reality, most of the deeper conversations and connections (with friends too) happen in person, with no record to speak of.
- CodeTrekker 13y agoI can't believe some PhD is being paid to write this sort of trivial stuff
- diydsp 13y agoWhat exactly kind of graph is this? I see three plots: a blue line, a thick purple segment and black speckles. None of them are labelled. Is one of them a mean, for example? What is the variance in these data? My gf and I only post on each other's pages once per month, max, for example, yet we ust be part of this "study." The variance is especially important because the six-month span from top to bottom (1.66 - 1.54 = 0.12) is large compared to mean of the whole graph (~1.60). What kind of selection criteria were used to create this graph? How many couples? What ages? What countries? (I don't accept "worldwide" b/c I don't accept that people of all countries post at the same rate). This "information" has all the marks of Facebook trumpeting their macho data muscles to impress advertisers and the Atlantic flexing their paranoia muscle to stoke reader's outrage. I suspect those black dots are simply graphical saccharine to give the aesthetic appearance of "data."
- baking 13y agoExactly. It's just a minor effect that Facebook can detect using their massive database and use to convince advertisers to pay a premium for, even though there is no evidence of how good a predictor it is. How many people that have a slight increase in their cross-posting actually get into a relationship? Using bad data science used to sell ads.
- gedrap 13y agoI remember reading on HN that some US supermarket [0] could predict pregnancy based on shopping. So they would start sending baby-care products offers before the couples found about it. They ceased doing that because people found it just too creepy. Any more remembers more? [0] a really large one, so that I recognised it's brand while never been outside Europe
- silencio 13y agoThe store was Target. The story was that a teenage girl was buying things there that was indicative of pregnancy and her father found out through the ads they sent her. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.h... http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targe...
- Houshalter 13y agoIt's simpler than that. It isn't necessarily that the company predicts you are pregnant, they just see that "people that buy this item are more likely to buy these items" and so advertise for them. I believe Target did target pregnancy specifically in their algorithms though.
- amjaeger 13y agoIt would be more interesting to also see the stats about IM's between two people. Also does their study account for all the teenage girls that post that they are in a relationship with their best (girl) friend?
- cyphunk 13y agoThis is selective after the fact analysis. The data of how people behave before and after a relationship positive apex (two people becoming a couple) is irrelevant unless compared with those with a negative apex as well (those that did not become a couple).
- fudged71 13y ago"Facebook might understand your romantic prospects better than you do." This article makes me angry. 4 years ago, I met a girl and we added each other on Facebook. For a year, she saw my posts, but Facebook was hiding all her posts from me. Ultimately we ran into each other again and fell in love. But it really sucks that I didn't see that year of her life while it was happening. Facebook simply decided not to show her in my timeline. I wish that my friendships and relationships were not judged by an algorithm or censored without my knowledge. Machine learning et al are great for numerical tasks, but let's not try to treat emotions quantitatively. I would hope that we have a better sense of our emotions than computers reading just a fraction of my communications with someone.
- 72deluxe 13y agoCouldn't you have met up and shared pictures or looked at photo albums, like they did in the 80s?
- JetSpiegel 13y agoNot for Hacker News denizens. There's probably a startup idea here. Digitalize photo albums and show them on a web interface.
- Consultant32452 13y agoI would argue: not for anyone under 30. These kids eat up social media like it's going out of style.
- 72deluxe 13y agoI am 30 next month, and I don't consume social media at the same rate as others. I still enjoy meeting up or ringing people! My brother who is 37 dines at the fast-food serving social media restaurant far more than I do. He practically drives through! Wittily (and entirely seriously), he asked me "Do you use Twitter? It's like free text messaging!"..... Perhaps I am a bit of a stick in the mud? Besides, if I liked a girl as the parent said, I would much rather be with her (literally!) than feeling cheated that I couldn't observe portions of her life that she chose to share as served to my handheld device. It's like viewing life through a tiny viewfinder instead of looking around a bit more. Different lifestyles I suppose.
- kfk 13y agoWow, 100 days, that's over 3 months, what can they possibly be sharing/talking over 100 days? So we are saying this people are "trading" the outcome of 2-3 dates with 100 days of cat pictures sharing? I really don't get the point of this.
- crusso 13y agoThe y axis on that graph could be swapped out for "attention to exercise and personal appearance".
- disgruntledphd2 13y agoLink to the actual note, if anyone is interested: https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-data-science/the-formation-of-love/10152064609253859 https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-data-science/the-for...
- awayand 13y agoan increasing number of posts leading to a relationship and then a drop in messages as the couple is spending time together - OMG GENIUS I WOULD HAVE NEVER GUESSED!!!!
- Houshalter 13y agoHindsight bias devalues science: http://lesswrong.com/lw/im/hindsight_devalues_science/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/im/hindsight_devalues_science/
- Toenex 13y agoAnecdotally I can confirm. I've been happily married for 15 years and I've never even heard of Facebook.
- jsun 13y agoIn my experience the data presented here shows the need to cut further or obtain additional data. There's some correlation, but the data appears to be a rough aggregate and the absolute magnitude of the movement is small. Also unclear if cyclical or macro effects were removed. Pretty much all the other comments here are anecdotal or attempted to draw conclusions from insufficient data. This is why pop psychology is generally reviled by psychologists.
- smoyer 13y agoI know FB is built to create engagement on their site, but I don't have an FB account - the data science team posts are amazing and it's the first content that makes me want to "follow" along. Is there a service to convert FB pages into RSS feeds? Edit: I found it here: https://www.facebook.com/feeds/notes.php?id=8394258414&viewer=0&key=AWjDEHR4mDKInNmC&format=rss20 https://www.facebook.com/feeds/notes.php?id=8394258414&viewe... - I didn't realize I'd have to click through the "see more" link on the time-line.