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Facebook Reveals its User-Tracking Secrets

November 19, 2011 Marco advertising, business, cookies, data, internet, marketing, media, privacy, social, statistics, targeting, technology, tracking, web analytics

Facebook doesn’t track everybody the same way. It uses different methods for members who have signed in and are using their accounts, members who are logged-off and non-members.
The first time you arrive at any Facebook.com page, the company inserts cookies in your browser. If you sign up for an account, it inserts two types of cookies. If you don’t set up an account, it only inserts one of the two types.
These cookies record every time you visit another website that uses a Facebook Like button or other Facebook plugin — which work together with the cookies to note the time, date and website being visited. Unique characteristics that identify your computer are also recorded.
Facebook keeps logs that record your past 90 days of activity. It deletes entries older than 90 days.
If you are logged into a Facebook account, your name, email address, friends and all of the other data in your Facebook profile is also recorded.
Source and full article: Mashable

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The benefits of sorting data

November 6, 2011 Marco analysis, business, data, internet, marketing, statistics, technology, tracking, web analytics

Sorting also can streamline processing. comScore sorts URL data to minimize Web site taxonomy lookups. Instead of loading the 40 URLs for Web site pages in the order they were visited during a session, sorting might reveal that 20 of those pages were on Facebook, 12 were on GMail and the balance were at NYTimes.com. The sorted data would trigger just three site lookups whereas unsorted data might trigger many redundant lookups if the visitor bounced back and forth among just a few sites. “That saves a lot of CPU time and a lot of effort,” Brown says. It’s possible to sort data with SQL statements, and custom scripts, but sorting is also a common feature in data-integration software from IBM, Informatica, Oracle, SAP, SAS, Syncsort, and others. At truly large scale, Hadoop is an option for sorting and other processing steps.

Sources:

Article: informationweek.com

Image: john norris

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How The CIA Uses Social Media to Track How People Feel

November 6, 2011 Marco analysis, data, internet, legal and social aspects, media, mobile, news, privacy, social, statistics, targeting, technology, tracking, web analytics

How stable is China? What are people discussing and thinking in Pakistan? To answer these sorts of question, the U.S. government has turned to a rich source: social media.

The Associated Press reports that the CIA maintains a social-media tracking center operated out of an nondescript building in a Virginia industrial park. The intelligence analysts at the agency’s Open Source Center, who other agents refer to as “vengeful librarians,” are tasked with sifting through millions of tweets, Facebook messages, online chat logs, and other public data on the World Wide Web to glean insights into the collective moods of regions or groups abroad.

Sources:

Article: www.theatlantic.com

Featured image: elkbuntu

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