Facebook Is Also Tracking What You Don’t Do

It’s kind of obvious at this point that Facebook is storing, packaging, and selling every bit of data you give them while you use their “free service” to connect with your family, friends, and whatever.

I think most people get this and many don’t care. I personally think it’s a very dangerous precedent to allow someone else to profit off your private business, especially since they will continually sell you out to new and interesting ways to exploit you.

That cost to my entire future life is not worth the “service” that Facebook offers.

But now it’s really getting interesting. Facebook is leading the study of collecting and analyzing what you don’t do. See, non-actions are actions in the Facebook world, and once they started profiting off your posts they can’t keep that addiction going (and profits up) if you don’t post more and more.

You need to feed the beast, there’s lots of shareholders out there.

But now the beast is watching who you don’t reply to, who you don’t friend, where you lurk, how long you stay, and most creepily – what you don’t submit!

If you type into a form text box anywhere on Facebook and don’t hit submit, close your browser, or let it sit there, Facebook has already read it. And they are giving those messages more priority in a creepy “we know what you are really thinking” way.

If you use Facebook to login to other sites, guess what – they aren’t commenting on whether they can track your non-activities on external sites.

Since we know they are tracking views and clicks and how it all connects to your ‘social graph’ (your Facebook account), I’m pretty sure they can build that out soon enough.

Also, don’t forget that Facebook’s software is constantly building your political profile, not to mention you other hobbies, interests, and opinions. Police are making arrests through Facebook, employers are running Facebook-based “background checks”, and soon enough you’ll be able to get a full workup of someone’s entire digital profile just by ID’ing them.

Straight stalker style. Weird future times, indeed.