'tis easier to beg forgiveness than ask permission.
It’s been going on in some capacity post 9/11. Twitter is one of the few companies out there that has been fighting to keep user data private, FB on the other hand seems exactly like the kind of company that would enthusiastically throw their users under the bus for profit
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Facebook apologized for conducting the research and says it will now conduct an internal investigation to discover why it did so.
Must remember that next time I’m caught doing something. “I will now conduct an internal investigation to discover why I tripped your toddler into that canal”.
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So that’s what that chill was.
I thought it was just the creeping hand of death.
Well played 
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Yeah. And yet we’re all supposed to let our kids have access to FB because, you know, their friends will think they’re not cool if we don’t.
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Ars has added this:
Update, 5/1 12:12 p.m.: Facebook has issued a statement disputing The Australian’s report. “The premise of the article is misleading,” the company wrote in its authorless statement. “Facebook does not offer tools to target people based on their emotional state. The analysis done by an Australian researcher was intended to help marketers understand how people express themselves on Facebook. It was never used to target ads and was based on data that was anonymous and aggregated.”
Just like the company said in its original apology, it repeated this vague explanation: “Facebook has an established process to review the research we perform. This research did not follow that process, and we are reviewing the details to correct the oversight.” However, the statement didn’t acknowledge why Facebook did not make any distinction clear to The Australian. As of press time, The Australian has not updated its report, nor has it printed or disclosed full pages of the quoted to either confirm or dispute Facebook’s response.
There’s parts of that that sounds plausible (it being done by a third-party local researcher explains why it’s specifically Australian teens and not US or worldwide), and much as I distrust facebook, “we let someone produce aggregate data on how teens post” sounds more likely than “we are planning to let advertisers target especially vulnerable teens”. Not that the latter would be beyond them, by all means.
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that seems reasonable but you have to consider the fact that you are dealing wih both a large corporation and the US goverment, and they support each other’s interests, and the people that the US government likes to surveil and mark as “dangerous” are usually brown, black and/or poor among other things, so this could go terribly wrong very fast (see example: Muslim boy arrested for building a clock)
edit: I changed my mind it’s not reasonable at all
edit: example #2 http://boingboing.net/2017/05/02/black-art-student-with-glue-gu.html
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theater guy has 4 fingers on right hand and 5 on his left.
yeah but getting paid for it totally validates starting your own surveillance network. It’s like robbing a bank is ok because that’s where the money is.
Is this where I should insert the “why not both?” thingy?
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