* * * * *

It only takes 33 bits of information to identify a single person in the world

Speaking of FaceGoogleMyBookPlusSpace [1], this was quoted in one of the
comments on Flutterby [2]:

> The surest way to discourage conversations is to enable likes/favorites and
> retweets/reblogs. These inarticulate gestures barely qualify as social.
> They are literally the least amount of social interaction you can have with
> someone. Press a button, done. Much social, wow. They are the form letters
> of social networks. No personal response is required. To whom it may
> concern: click. I would've traded one hundred likes for one person taking
> the small amount of time and effort to personally reply with "I like your
> tweet." When my tweets got likes but no replies, it was still a very empty
> experience for me. It still felt like I was tweeting into the void.
>

“What's Wrong With Twitter [3]”

While “likes” might be socially meaningless, they might also be quite
dangerous as highlighted here:

> Kosinski and his team tirelessly refined their models. In 2012, Kosinski
> proved that on the basis of an average of 68 Facebook "likes" by a user, it
> was possible to predict their skin color (with 95 percent accuracy), their
> sexual orientation (88 percent accuracy), and their affiliation to the
> Democratic or Republican party (85 percent). But it didn't stop there.
> Intelligence, religious affiliation, as well as alcohol, cigarette and drug
> use, could all be determined. From the data it was even possible to deduce
> whether someone's parents were divorced.
>
> The strength of their modeling was illustrated by how well it could predict
> a subject's answers. Kosinski continued to work on the models incessantly:
> before long, he was able to evaluate a person better than the average work
> colleague, merely on the basis of ten Facebook "likes." Seventy "likes"
> were enough to outdo what a person's friends knew, 150 what their parents
> knew, and 300 "likes" what their partner knew. More "likes" could even
> surpass what a person thought they knew about themselves.
>

Via Hacker News (The comments are largely critical of the article, by the
way.) [4], “The Data That Turned the World Upside Down [5]”

Oh, and those online quizes that often show up on FaceGoogleMyBookPlusSpace?
Yeah, they work just like “likes” in pinning you down (as described in the
“World Upside Down” article).

I'm just saying …

[1] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2017/02/01.2
[2] https://www.flutterby.com/archives/comments/23902.html
[3] http://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/twitter.html
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13542735
[5] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/how-our-likes-helped-trump-

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