Is Facebook Crossing The Line?

Almost everyone we know has a Facebook account. Facebook is a way to stay connected with friends and family as well as reconnect with those who may have lost touch along the way. But what happens when Facebook becomes big brother? Facebook has continually increased technology of knowing where its users are, what their faces look like, and what they are interested in. When does this stop becoming a form of connection and cross the line into creepy?

Facebook currently has options to “check in” which is letting people know where you are, Facial Recognition, which allows people to “tag” friends in pictures, and a Memories function that allows Facebook to bring up certain posts or photos from your activity history.

Now all of these things may seem like great ways to keep in touch with people and remember the good times- and they are. They are great tools to keep us sucked into Facebook. They make us feel like if we are not checking into Facebook daily, we are disconnected. Quite honestly it is a brilliant strategy by Facebook, but in all reality it is getting kind of creepy. Facebook is now utilizing a new machine learning algorithm that pulls recent pictures from your phone, tags them by recognizing your friends and then prompts you to post them.

It was one thing when Facebook started advertising to me in a strangely specific way, but now that it can nag me about what photos I have kept to myself- we are in a whole other playing field. I don’t know about you, but I have enough things on my to do list to need Facebook making me feel guilty about not posting every detail of my life. Also, I know that we agree to Facebook’s access to our photos on cell phone devices, but that is also a little worrisome that Facebook can see all of the photos on my phone and now just the ones I ask it to. It begs the question, what kind of security system does Facebook have? Are they protected against hackers?

Hopefully as Facebook continues to develop new algorithms that become more invasive, they will also increase their security.

To learn more about the scary amount of information Big Data knows about you, check out this article!