The social network has commissioned a select group of employees to use artificial intelligence techniques to achieve a comprehensive analysis of user information.
All information that Facebook collects from us will be available to a team of eight people whom the company has recruited to research artificial intelligence techniques for analysing user data. The team will use the techniques to deduce events not explicitly described on the social network and the emotions of individuals with regard to different stimuli. This is an effort to personalize the ads and involves extremely advanced software.
The artificial intelligence technique that this elite Facebook team uses is called deep learning. The name says it all: the intention is to get to know the social network’s users intimately. Through a software-driven analysis of the data, Facebook will be able to recognize objects in photos and collate information to predict the behaviour of its members in the future.
No one can fail to notice that, the more things Facebook knows about its users, the greater its ability to improve its advertising system and offer more tightly targeted ads according to each user’s interests. Facebook are not the only ones employing this tactic, which, in fact, is widespread all throughout the internet, but theirs is, perhaps, the platform where the most personal data has been stored.
It is on this foundation that the company intends to deploy the most advanced software analysis and artificial intelligence. This system is sustained on levels, among which the concepts known about a user are distributed. Higher level knowledge is defined by the information provided by the lower. These data can be varied and need not be pre-sorted, as the power of the algorithms allows relationships between seemingly very remote areas to be established.
Information levels will be deployed in a network format in order to create a variable hierarchy. New data can be added to this set at any time and will go on to occupy a certain position in relation to the rest of the network, . The scope is such that inevitable questions are raised about privacy, already a controversial issue for the social network even before the appearance of its new super-algorithm.
Technology analyst Jim McGregor believes, however, that the real risk is that this information might be sold to third parties. Because what Facebook wants to do is the same thing that it is doing already, but with greater precision.
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