Mr. Topp and the Big Bad Blog

I log on to Facebook, and there’s an ad there … for Marmite.

I click over to my profile, and see three more ads. HSBC is trying to sell me a mortgage. The Royal Bank of Scotland is recruiting. And Virgin Media wants me to use their telephone and television services.

There is something wrong with this picture.

Just like everybody else, I pay for Facebook. Not in the traditional sense, but in the sense that using the service gives them information that they can then turn around and use to sell things to me and my friends. Facebook knows who I am connected to, and how those groups bunch — the fencing friends, the friends who like comic books and science fiction TV shows, and so on.

They also see degrees of interaction — they know what profiles I look at most often, and which ones I interact with most often. In addition to this, they know my location, where I went to school, and some of my interests. Other interests can be extrapolated on the basis of groups I’m a part of, and my Facebook connections. For the most part, if my friends like something I probably will as well.

In other words, they should know quite a bit about me. But their ads don’t show this.

A mortgage from a UK bank? OK, you know my age and location.
Virgin’s television service? Clearly my TV watching habits are overestimated. And they haven’t managed to pinpoint my exact location, or they would know that Virgin’s high speed internet is not actually available in my neighborhood.

Facebook knows more than that about me. And about you. They should be able to take that information, and post relevant ads.

I cannot figure out why there aren’t more ads from airlines when I arrive on Facebook. I interact rather heavily with people from all over the world, and log on from different locations on a regular basis. My country of residence is different from the one in which I attended school. I’m a good target for airline and hotel deals.

I cannot figure out why there aren’t more ads for geeky movies. A huge number of my friends are geeks. Our interests and interactions with each other and with groups and being “Fans” of things on Facebook must point heavily towards things like Watchmen, Star Trek or Tron. These are not advertised to me.

Facebook is sitting on a mountain of data about my interests — information based not on what I choose to write on my profile, but on my actual habits — but they are not leveraging it. They need to organize it, or (if it is already organized), give their advertisers the tools they need to leverage it properly.

The only thing that they have managed to do is upset users by including their faces in the advertisements they show their friends.

I should see an advertisement for something that interests me every time I log onto Facebook.

They know who they are targeting — we all log on.
They know what we are interested in, and where we are.

One would think the advertising would be relevant.

Tech and World ads, advertisement, advertising, cost, facebook, privacy

One of the most fascinating things I have read on the Internet in a long time is this interview with an anonymous Facebook employee, where they talk largely about privacy, and a little bit about weirdos on Facebook. It’s worth reading.

(Audrey Deluxe performs Burlesque as Boba Fett. Photo by Shannon Cottrell. More here.)

New York. Subway. No pants. That’s just the way they roll.

Book burning might be out of fashion, but thepublicdomain.org argues here that gradual changes to copyright law over the past fifty years are accomplishing the same thing.

morning coffee Audrey Deluxe, Boba Fett, book burning, brown sharpie, burlesque, copyright, facebook, law, math, mathematics, pants, philosophy, privacy, Shannon Cottrell, star wars, striptease, subway

We begin with an interesting article from the Calgary Herald, which looks at the invasion of privacy inherit in most copyright laws designed to battle Internet piracy.

From there, though, we lose the words and go entirely visual.

morning coffee bonsai, caia koopman, copyright, piracy, privacy, saturday morning breakfast cereal

It is not rare for me to make statements regarding the British education system which are derogatory. Perhaps this is unfair of me — I have not been through it, nor do I have any children who are/will be going through it. I am not friends with anybody in the system, who might tell me what goes on every day.

Perhaps it is that the system here is different from the one I grew up in, in significant ways. I often argue that it sacrifices breadth of knowledge in an attempt to establish depth of knowledge at an earlier age than we do in North America — too early. And perhaps my opinion is fed by the press here, who — like everywhere, I would guess — critiques the country’s youth and its schools, rather than celebrating them.

Recently, a group of students went “on strike” over closed caption television cameras being installed in their classroom. They make their point quite well in this Guardian article, an excerpt of which can be found below. Perhaps my critiques were unjustified, if the authors are typical of the students the system here creates.

Many users suggested that cameras were a good idea because they could be used to keep an eye on bullying and student behaviour, we were accused of been “narcissistic megalomaniacs” angry at “being nabbed for our churlish troublemaking”. This stereotypical and frankly ignorant view ignores the fact that Davenant Foundation School produces some of the best exam results in Essex. Violent behaviour among pupils is simply not an issue, making the justification for putting cameras in our classrooms more surprising.

Eroding standards in schools and deteriorating discipline are down to a broken society and the failure of the education system. The truth is that we are whatever the generation before us has created. If you criticise us, we are your failures; and if you applaud us we are your successes, and we reflect the imperfections of society and of human life. If you want to reform the education system, if you want to raise education standards, then watching children every hour of every day isn’t the answer. The answer is to encourage students to learn by creating an environment in which they can express their ideas freely and without intimidation.

observations and opinions cctv, education, privacy, UK