Facebook, at present, is the biggest social networking platform all over the world. Today, most of us prefer turning to this social networking site to share details of everyday life with friends and families. Here’s a brief description of how Facebook has emerged as one of the most efficient and successful companies in the world in utilizing big data properly and earning substantial profits. It will not really be wrong to claim that Facebook has revolutionized Social Media privacy and data protection in a major way. Today, within the scope of this post we will clearly be looking at ways in which Facebook has explored big data.
Facebook and Big Data:
Big Data is vital to the very being of a company. It should be managed properly to reap due benefits.
Facebook deals with Big Data, a term that includes both the hardware and software to analyze the data itself. It knows mostly all details of its users—what they look like, about their friends, their views on most of the things, their birthdays, relationships, the location they are at, their likes and dislikes, and much more. Facebook’s inspiration for big data collection and analysis has always been to sell advertisements all over the world. The huge and speedy success of this platform is prompted by the simple interface and emphasis on user privacy.
Facebook depends on a massive installation of Hadoop, a highly scalable open-source framework of Big Data Technology to solve all the problems. Their entire business is based on the effective exploitation of their big data. The more Facebook is used, the more they will learn about users and the more valuable information will be obtained. Facebook invests hugely in its ability to collect, store and analyze all the provided data. It has processing and faces recognition capabilities that allow efficient user tracking.
Face recognition helps Facebook to make tag suggestions for people on photos generally uploaded by the users.
It is now possible to predict the accurate range of highly sensitive personal attributes simply by the analysis of the number of ‘Likes’ on Facebook. Facebook ‘Likes’ can very accurately predict the sexual orientation of the user, whether they are satisfied with life, brilliance, emotional stability, religion, whether he/she has the habit of consumption of alcohol and drug. It can predict their relationship status, age, gender, race, and political views among all.
Difference between Facebook and Google in using big data:
Google has significantly influenced the way big data is analyzed today. They are more responsible for making it part of our everyday lives. The big data usage of Google goes beyond basic search– it is their core business. The process has 3.5 billion requests per day, and each request queries a database of 20 billion web pages. Google builds up huge amounts of data about its users. Then it matches up companies with potential customers. It mixes what it knows about the users from their previous search history, which includes information about location, as well as data from Google+ profile and Gmail messages, and comes up with its best guess at what you are looking for. There is clearly a distinct difference between the data using techniques adopted by Google and Facebook. Google is not as “explicit” as Facebook when it comes to big data exploration. While the former tries to gauge user preference by the sites visited by them and the information collected from individual Google Plus messages and profiles, the latter directly asks users who they are, what interests they have and where they live, etc. Google Plus, later, tried to replicate the same technique. The results were for everyone to see. Advertisers, from the period 2011-2013 witnessed a 49% increase in ad revenues from Google, compared to a whopping 129% from Facebook.
Difference between Facebook and Twitter in using big data:
Twitter is an online social networking service that helps users to send and read short messages of 140-characters namely Tweets. A difference between Facebook and Twitter in their usage of Big Data is the popularity and the way of usage. Twitter produces 12 times more data each day than the New York Stock Exchange—whereas Facebook takes in 500 times more data each day than the New York Stock Exchange.
Difference between Facebook and Youtube in using big data:
Youtube is a video-sharing site available throughout the world. Millions of users have created accounts on the site to upload videos. Big data is being used here in different ways. But analysis of Big Data in Facebook is greater than it is in Youtube. More than 4 Billion hours of videos are watched on YouTube each month. More than 30 billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook each day.
Latest changes in the usage of big data in Facebook:
Recently some changes have been observed in the usage of big data by Facebook. Its users’ habits are monitored now and these have caused more concerns. Its latest monitoring tools track every detail, from how frequently users move their cursor over certain parts of the page to which websites they visit besides Facebook. This information is being used in the algorithms that determine the adverts to show to the common people. Facebook’s Data Science team leads its data strategy and they post regular updates on their insights upon the analysis of the millions of users’ habits who browse the site. Even they can predict the upcoming events in their personal lives. Undoubtedly, these attributes are helping Facebook sell its adverts like never before.
Some more facilities are made available by Facebook today. The ability to delete an account permanently is definitely one of the most notable facilities. One, who is unwilling to keep personal data and other details on Facebook, can delete them permanently if s/he doesn’t want Facebook to have access to it anymore. Before 2010 it was impossible to delete an account –back then one could only remove a profile. Everything was kept on their servers for both an unspecified amount of time and unspecified purposes. When this problem was discovered, Facebook provided the ability to erase an account.
Privacy Concerns with Facebook:
The privacy worries caused by Facebook are addressed by the fact that all the information is shared with due permission and anonymized while selling for marketing purposes though a lot of critics are concerned with their practices.
Facebook does not need to push changes to see their impact at present. By historical data, a model can be validated before production.
Facebook using Big Data in mobile advertising:
Facebook’s massive data analytics warehouse provides the foundation for the research over mobile advertising. It is working harder on measures to bring costs down and the industry needs to cooperate to do this. Facebook is increasing its profits from mobile advertising with its perfect utilization of big data.
Facebook has become one of the biggest receptacles of personal data all over the world with its range of potential uses. Therefore it has become necessary to legitimatize data in the social network. It can market the data altogether to provide predictive analytics. But the system does not give rise to any major data privacy matter since it is consolidated and anonymous.
What matters is not how brilliant the analysis can be, but the business unit to translate them properly to increase its periphery throughout the world. Otherwise, the usage of Big Data is utterly meaningless.
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