You know any text that you write in the status box is sent to Facebook servers even if you don't publish it. Facebook calls it 'Self-Censorship'.
"Facebook calls these unposted thoughts "self-censorship," and insights into how it collects these non-posts can be found in a recent paper written by two Facebookers. Sauvik Das, a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon and summer software engineer intern at Facebook, and Adam Kramer, a Facebook data scientist, have put online an article presenting their study of the self-censorship behavior collected from 5 million English-speaking Facebook users. (The paper was also published at the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media.*)
It reveals a lot about how Facebook monitors our unshared thoughts and what it thinks about them. The study examined aborted status updates, posts on other people's timelines, and comments on others' posts. To collect the text you type, Facebook sends code to your browser. That code automatically analyses what you type into any text box and reports metadata back to Facebook."
Dave Higgins subsequently recorded this behavior with some basic screen cast software to illustrate what is happening. That's correct, there is a HTTP post request sent containing the text he just entered. This is outright Orwellian, and inconvenient.
"Facebook calls these unposted thoughts "self-censorship," and insights into how it collects these non-posts can be found in a recent paper written by two Facebookers. Sauvik Das, a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon and summer software engineer intern at Facebook, and Adam Kramer, a Facebook data scientist, have put online an article presenting their study of the self-censorship behavior collected from 5 million English-speaking Facebook users. (The paper was also published at the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media.*)
It reveals a lot about how Facebook monitors our unshared thoughts and what it thinks about them. The study examined aborted status updates, posts on other people's timelines, and comments on others' posts. To collect the text you type, Facebook sends code to your browser. That code automatically analyses what you type into any text box and reports metadata back to Facebook."
Since I am now aware of this, I am more cautious about what I enter into the text area, however I can't help but notice the adverse effect of my new found awareness ― am I experiencing the censorship of my own thoughts because of a faceless entity such as Facebook that doesn't care about you? I very much believe that is the case.