For years we have experienced “data mining” of different sorts through shopping at the grocery store or shopping mall, both more or less public venues. At the grocery store, coupons are often printed out after you checkout for items that you just purchased, saving you a few dollars next time around. In malls, when you make a purchase at a store, they may use your information to send you quarterly catalogs of their new products. While this is similar to the data mining issue(s) of today, one may argue that these are methods are less intrusive because it is in a public place, and not in the privacy of your home.

In the Gizmodo article “Minimalist Profile? Facebook Knows About You Too” by David Zax, a contributing author to Gizmodo and author on FastCompany.com, Zax writes about a recent patent that was filed by Facebook to allow them to use your friends’ data on Facebook to infer what interests you may have as well. If you have looked on Facebook recently, the entire right margin consists of ads that are generated based on your interests, posts, and ‘likes’ on Facebook, but the tool that Facebook has applied a patent for would allow them to still generate ads for a barren profile using their friend’s information and not theirs.

Is this fair that if someone has purposefully chosen to have a minimalist Facebook profile in order to not divulge their interests to any third-party, that their information and interests are being inferred based on their friends’? I think that this is an issue that can either be completely ignored by the user, or fought against by downloading programs such as AdBlock which discreetly block the ads that are generated on your Facebook page.

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5676981/minimalist-profile-facebook-knows-about-you-too