Facebook Patents Tech To Bucket Users Into Different Social Classes

Hardware Hub Tech Policy & News
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I’m not even sure what to say about this.
This is wrong on a variety of levels and I’m not even sure where to begin unpacking this mess.
Simply the audacity and arrogance of the idea and the classifier assumptions are unethical.

Link to the actual patent.

Facebook has no idea what “middle class” means, apparently:

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If you can contribute, please feel free to read & discuss. Try to bring meaningful insight.
Example:

  • Links to FaceBook’s prior activities.
  • Materials that extend everyone’s understanding.

These types of activities really have to be curtailed according to a set of ethical & legal limitations imposed on user data utilization.

I’m absolutely appalled by this and categorically opposed to it.

Courteous Warning

Avoid Memes, one liner responses, or equivalents such as ‘Duh Facebook’ or stating your hate for facebook. We already know.

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Well that is what Facebook, Google and … every company in existence probably at this point … are doing anyway: Binning people. Because that is what you do with your product.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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Divide and conquer. Looks like execution of a long term plan to overtake the newspaper. Or media outlets in this case. Divide people into categories, give the undesirables their own sand box and scrutinize everything they produce to completely drown out the competition. Done. What you get is a homogenous mass of people who agree to censor another group of people. Us and them. Checkmate. Hope I’m wrong.

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I am a little confused on the validity of a patent like this. Can you patent concepts?

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Not sure why Facebook needs this strange choice of “algorithm”. What’s it going to do? Shaft anyone who isn’t middle class because the middle class in it’s current state is almost non-existent, your either super rich or poor.

Classism is already an issue as it is.

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Some benefits of this:

Facebook can target certain groups for financial aid, social and educational. Maybe they have scholarships.

Facebook can tailor ads to better demographics. Why advertise a $5,000 necklace to someone that barely makes double that in a year.

Encourage meetups. Yes, diversity is good, all hail diversity, but I still hangout with my friends from growing up because we’re on the same level. I can be social at work, but it’s obnoxious, all they talk about is football, basketball, other things I don’t give two shits about.

Honestly, I wish Google Maps would do this. I’m tired of the “fastest route” taking me to shitty neighborhoods.

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So there is a valid reason for this after all.

I stand corrected. Still, I have no interest in ads telling me what products I need to make my life better especially when it’s stimulating my drugs like how an alcoholic is stimulated by more alcohol.

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Yes and no. From the USPTO website:

Interpretations of the statute by the courts have defined the limits of the field of subject matter that can be patented, thus it has been held that the laws of nature, physical phenomena, and abstract ideas are not patentable subject matter.

A patent cannot be obtained upon a mere idea or suggestion. The patent is granted upon the new machine, manufacture, etc., as has been said, and not upon the idea or suggestion of the new machine. A complete description of the actual machine or other subject matter for which a patent is sought is required.
https://www.uspto.gov/patents-getting-started/general-information-concerning-patents

However, a “process” can be patented, and we know in software a lot can be patented rather vaguely to the point that it may as well just be an idea sometimes.

That said, it looks like Facebook has more than a mere idea here. They have at least an outline of the full process by which this system would work along with the various components and devices performing actions to make this happen. It’s possible they’ve already written the code for it or done a proof of concept.

Getting back to the original topic though, while I don’t like it, I don’t see any reason there should be legal restrictions against this kind of system. They can do what they want with their data and system, even if it were to get to the level of dividing access between users based on this system that they define themselves. The only issue would be if they had some power to impose a legal separation of rights though such a system or something, but Facebook, as far as we know, is not so powerful at the moment.

If the government did this kind of division and imposed different treatment under the law, it may be a bigger legal problem. That said, to a degree governments frequently do this, including the U.S. government, in the way of differences in tax brackets and other assistance, but one can argue about the details of the implementation and whether or not it crosses a line, and bring up counter examples to a pure classist view of it.

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Define poor, and rich while you’re at it.

My family makes enough money to own 5 acres and a house in a Detroit suburb and put my sister through college (I’m paying for my own schooling with my own wages). We aren’t driving top tier cars or all toting an iPhoneX so if there was ever a middle class it’s me.

Inb4 I’m rich

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Look up wealth inequality, it’s dangerously high, and getting higher. Almost everyone is considered poor, some not as poor such as yourself or even myself, and then you have homeless people which is a lot worse.

To the super rich, your on the same boat as me, poor. And they pit the middle class against the poor while the rich rob them blind of their wealth which puts them on the same boat. That’s why the middle class is barely existent. Of course, it don’t help when the middle class like to blame poor people for their problems instead of actually being mad at the ones in control but whatever.

And we seen history of what happens when societies wealth inequality reaches too high, and it’s not pretty.

Now, you might ask “why should I care, I make enough money to live” but then what happens if you got kicked off your own property because somebody wealthy wanted to build a freaking casino (as an example) in your spot? Or the government could too I suppose if they wanted to build a road.

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Going off topic here but I’ll reply anyway. Wouldn’t happen in my area because it’s already highly developed but eminent domain is a necessary evil. While it can be fought in court obviously most can’t afford it so blah blah rich win “poor” lose.

On topic:
The whole bucket thing could just be for more fluid advertising. You don’t advertise a Omega Speedmaster to someone making 25k a year. Same as you don’t advertise a WE TAKE ALL CREDIT SCORES dealership to someone making 250k

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I’d say describing that situation as a matter of a nearly non-existent middle class or a “you’re either super rich or your poor” is over-simplifying the matter a bit. That you are “poor by comparison to the super rich” isn’t terribly meaningful. There are multimillionaires with more than what is reasonable to live on luxury without any more work in their lives that are “poor by comparison” to the top 10 richest people.

For that matter, even those often classified as poor are “rich in comparison” to some average people, or even some rich people, in certain time periods of the past, but that’s why we don’t often make that kind of trans-temporal comparisons without qualification I guess.

That’s not to say inequality isn’t a problem. But, I would say it undercuts the argument to look at it too simplistically or in a way that doesn’t properly account for the real situation.

On a side note, the the U.S. only the government can take away property that actually belongs to you. A company can, however, attempt to convince the government to take a property away from you and give it to them for various reasons, but the government has to be the one to do the taking (and they need to compensate you for it), and there are a plethora of legal proceedings that can block it (that are, granted, not always successful when clearly they should be).

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The middle class is shrinking more and more and that trend has happened for decades, to say now given the wealth inequality that “middle class is non-existent” is not really much of an exaggeration.

I think it’s simple enough to say that the richest is taking as much wealth and control as they can from everyone else. And we fight each other for scraps basically, or at least, they want it that way. Look at tech companies for example, we were their consumers, now we are also double as their product, is that not a problem? Suppose the wrong person wants me for their product. We can say nobody cares all they want but that’s gonna be everyone’s problem, not caring doesn’t magically make it a nonissue and that’s a nonargument anyways.

As for taking land, remember the North Dakota Pipeline. Yes the government has the power to do that but companies can wave money at the government and more often than not favors are done for them. Honestly the shit president everyone complains about now (understandably so) is a byproduct of this system. Also part of why I say “vote these fuckers out” can’t have cowards like Paul Ryan masquerading as a leader.

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The middle class is shrinking more and more and that trend has happened for decades, to say now given the wealth inequality that “middle class is non-existent” is not really much of an exaggeration.

It’s still a pretty big exaggeration, but defining terms is a good idea I suppose.

Look at tech companies for example, we were their consumers, now we are also double as their product, is that not a problem? Suppose the wrong person wants me for their product. We can say nobody cares all they want but that’s gonna be everyone’s problem, not caring doesn’t magically make it a nonissue and that’s a nonargument anyways.

You are now conflating different issues and, again, exaggerating and oversimplifying. No one here has said these things are not problems or even in any way implied that. Likewise, that we have become the ‘product’ of tech companies (though data mining and other methods) doesn’t support the prior claims about the middle class disappearing or how the rich operate or anything else. If we were to assume a connection, one would at best be a motivation (to take more wealth from the less wealthy), and the other a method (use people for their data). No one has said these things are not problems, nor has anyone proposed we shouldn’t care about them. Rather, it’s been proposed that we should look at the actual problems for what they are, as doing otherwise hinders resolution.

As for taking land, remember the North Dakota Pipeline. Yes the government has the power to do that but companies can wave money at the government and more often than not favors are done for them.

Yes, I also know of Walmart having similar outcomes in cities where the denial of property was more extreme (people kicked out of their houses permanently, rather than the situation with the Dakota Pipeline which would allow the farmers to retain the property but would result in certain restrictions on use of the property due to the pipeline running under it and do to disruptions during the construction). This was actually covered in my above statement. It doesn’t change that a company cannot simply remove you from your property to build a casino, or a store, or anything else. They must first go through the government, and that carries with it further legal avenues of challenge and restriction (which also came up in the Dakota Access Pipeline, but from what I can tell isn’t going to stop it or reroute it at this point).

Voting people out is all well and good by me, especially if we don’t fall into the trap of “there are only two parties to choose from, so vote for the other one” which certainly hasn’t helped in the past. We are probably getting a bit off topic at this point though.