Continuing a theme:

The “Custom Managed Audiences” tool works like this: A campaign or group uses its own list of potential voters (or buys one from a state authority or private vendor) and uploads it to Facebook. The company then matches the names to its user base through databases managed by companies, such as Acxiom, that specialize in collecting information about individuals. This process effectively combines the electoral information it already knows about voters with their Facebook profiles: likes, group memberships, issues or even favorites. The process anonymizes the users’ personal identifiers but retains enough information to enable campaigns to target well-defined groups.

No kidding Par, technology has come a long way. From their own data policy:

"We also receive other types of information about you:

We receive data about you whenever you use or are running Facebook, such as when you look at another person's timeline, send or receive a message, search for a friend or a Page, click on, view or otherwise interact with things, use a Facebook mobile app, or make purchases through Facebook.
When you post things like photos or videos on Facebook, we may receive additional related data (or metadata), such as the time, date, and place you took the photo or video.
We receive data from or about the computer, mobile phone, or other devices you use to install Facebook apps or to access Facebook, including when multiple users log in from the same device. This may include network and communication information, such as your IP address or mobile phone number, and other information about things like your internet service, operating system, location, the type (including identifiers) of the device or browser you use, or the pages you visit. For example, we may get your GPS or other location information so we can tell you if any of your friends are nearby, or we could request device information to improve how our apps work on your device.
We receive data whenever you visit a game, application, or website that uses Facebook Platform or visit a site with a Facebook feature (such as a social plugin), sometimes through cookies. This may include the date and time you visit the site; the web address, or URL, you're on; technical information about the IP address, browser and the operating system you use; and, if you are logged in to Facebook, your User ID.
Sometimes we get data from our affiliates or our advertising partners, customers and other third parties that helps us (or them) deliver ads, understand online activity, and generally make Facebook better. For example, an advertiser may tell us information about you (like how you responded to an ad on Facebook or on another site) in order to measure the effectiveness of - and improve the quality of - ads."

I don't like to think of them as Big Brother, so much as Friendly Older Brother. And now Facebook knows I checked out damnyouparas.com today. I wonder if I'll get in trouble for Googling "how to topple the social networking oligarchy" while I have Facebook open?

Holy crap, what happened to the summer? Par, we need to hang out before it ends up being winter already.

(Facebook) News Feed FYI: Click-baiting:

Today we’re announcing some improvements to News Feed to help people find the posts and links from publishers that are most interesting and relevant.
...

So how do we determine what looks like click-bait?

One way is to look at how long people spend reading an article away from Facebook.
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The best way to share a link after these updates will be to use the link format, so it looks like the one above. In our studies, these posts have received twice as many clicks compared to links embedded in photo captions.
...

Will this affect my Page?

A small set of publishers who are frequently posting links with click-bait headlines that many people don’t spend time reading after they click through may see their distribution decrease in the next few months. We’re making these changes to ensure that click-bait content does not drown out the things that people really want to see on Facebook.

Thanks Par!

Aaron Freeman discusses moving on from Ween

Happy Birthday, Al!

I'm partial to this at the moment (kind of spoilers for Guardians of the Galaxy?)

Got too much time? Stare at this for a while.

Rivale Specs