Data Science of Facebook Link

1M users donated data to Wolfram. The blog post is fascinating and I love the bits of detail they are able to pull out.

The incredible Steven Wolfram:

Some of this is rather depressingly stereotypical. And most of it isn’t terribly surprising to anyone who’s known a reasonable diversity of people of different ages. But what to me is remarkable is how we can see everything laid out in such quantitative detail in the pictures above—kind of a signature of people’s thinking as they go through life.

The data they used was anonymized. Now imagine it wasn’t, because I think we can presume that Facebook retains a key somewhere in their database that correlates a name with all of the data. Just imagine what kind of detailed story can be assembled about an individual with a lifetime of Facebook data. Now read about efforts like CISPA.

I love what Steven Wolfram does. It’s usually beautiful and insightful. Sometimes it is also frightening.