John Timmer reports at Ars Technica:

The court responded to this request by pursuing an extraordinarily rare course of action: it read Facebook’s entire terms of service. And, in this case, their vague language—typically used to provide broad immunity—became a liability: “[the document] does not establish that users consented to the scanning of their messages for advertising purposes, and in fact, makes no mention of ‘messages’ whatsoever.”

Be specific with those Terms of Service. Really specific.

If you use Facebook, this article is a must-read. It’s now common knowledge Facebook is always watching and analyzing how you use the service. But the breadth and depth of the company’s participation in the data brokering economy is staggering. The worst part? You literally signed up for it.

Facebook obviously doesn’t charge its users money, but the mere act of creating a profile affirmatively grants the company total access and usage rights over everything you do on the site. It even shares its data about you with data brokerage firms whose business model is monetizing you.

This is all stuff I have personally known and accepted for a long time, but as the ability to easily aggregate dossiers on anyone and everyone increases, it’s more important than ever to educate yourself and those you care about. Facebook is not free, and in fact it’s worth asking whether the price most people pay by clicking a harmless-looking “I agree” button is really worth it.

R. Jai Krishna, reporting on the reaction of Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg to the outcry over the company’s experiment on the emotions of nearly 700,000 unwitting users:

We take privacy and security at Facebook really seriously because that is something that allows people to share” opinions and emotions, Sandberg said.

The telling part about Sandberg’s reaction is that those who take privacy and security seriously don’t have to say it very often, if at all.

Aviva Rutkin, reporting in New Scientist:

A team of researchers, led by Adam Kramer at Facebook in Menlo Park, California, was curious to see if this phenomenon [of contagious emotion] would occur online. To find out, they manipulated which posts showed up on the news feeds of more than 600,000 Facebook users. For one week, some users saw fewer posts with negative emotional words than usual, while others saw fewer posts with positive ones.

Forget about the filter bubble, Facebook is (and has been since at least 2009) a Petri dish.

Click through to find out the results.

Related: Even the Editor of Facebook’s Mood Study Thought It Was Creepy

Violet Blue, reporting at ZDNet:

Facebook also announced Thursday it will begin tracking its users’ browsing and activities on websites and apps outside Facebook, starting within a few weeks

Her article is full of great advice for people who want to minimize Facebook’s tracking ability across desktop and mobile browsers. Be sure to have a look if the recent changes freak you out.

I actually think a lot of the reason why great stuff gets built is because it’s kind of irrational at the time, so it kind of selects for the people that care most about doing it.

A great point. That young man is going places.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is betting virtual reality will follow mobile as the next major communication paradigm. While I’m not sure that’s true with VR tech alone, the massive user base and data stores of Facebook, used wisely despite a minefield of privacy concerns, may be just what VR needs to go mainstream.

That of course assumes Oculus can get the tech to a mass-marketable state. With a $350 developer hardware kit, consumer-level pricing looks within reach. So perhaps Zuckerberg is onto something. But it’s easy to be social when you’re clicking around in a browser. The real question is whether people will have any interest in a totally immersive digital social experience.

Following up on my recent tirade, this made me happy. Facebook has massive amounts of influence, and is influenced by massive amounts of people, and changes like this are a positive step forward in how technology reconciles with shifting norms and modes of self-identificaiton. Good on ‘em.

Now, if Mr. Zuckerberg needs a good charity write-off for tax season, I would be happy to put him in touch with my student loan creditors.

I know this is an unpopular stance, but if you operate on any assumption other than that this happens all the time on myriad services you use, you’re a crazy unrealistic person lacking in the minimum amount of cynicism (read: realism) required to use the modern internet in a fully-informed manner.

While I don’t have time these days to do the digging someone should do on this, it strikes me as very likely we all gave Facebook permission to skim all of our content for ad-related and any other purposes when we signed up.

Digital privacy almost always comes with an asterisk these days, and that’s not going to change any time soon.

CNN’s Miguel Helft, in a great profile of Sandberg at the Money blog:

How Sandberg, amid all her Facebook activities, managed to write Lean In, orchestrate flashy book tours on three continents, launch a foundation, and become a ubiquitous spokesperson for the ambitions of women, remains baffling to most people.

Her advocacy for women in business is great, but what I find most impressive about Sandberg is not that she is a woman and an executive, but an executive with such a full plate who seems to truly love what she does.

In case you thought I was becoming a Facebook fanboy, let me just say that this celeb crap is something Zuck will be adding to his list of regrets within the year.

Granted, that’s probably a very short list, but this VIP thing is a distraction an a gimmick and it’s going nowhere.

And yes, I’m prepared to try some claim chowder if I’m wrong. I’m just pretty confident I’m not.

My headline says it all.

If you still had any doubt about the importance of mobile to anyone doing anything on the Internet, this stat should disabuse you of that uncertainty.

Amazing.

Huge

This is a good piece on how hard Facebook tries to keep the social juices flowing. Alexis Madrigal, commenting on Facebook’s designer-hiring spree:

As all these designers vanish into the bowels of the company, so, too, does their work. Facebook wants to create design that both allows and guides behavior without calling attention to itself. And what works in the Deep South must also work in southern India and South America. It must work for 16-year-olds and 86-year-olds.

I think this is the primary reason Facebook makes me uncomfortable: it’s too generic. Sometimes I want a service to be just a little in my way. I realize that you can’t generalize my preferences to hundreds of millions of people, but that just means I’ll never really feel awesome about using Facebook.

It feels like it’s been crafted as simply the most efficient way for me to send targeting data to advertisers…

…because it has.

Ellis Hamburger, writing at The Verge:

Mir­ror­ing its roll­out of free VoIP call­ing for iOS, Face­book has updat­ed its Mes­sen­ger app for Android to allow free call­ing for users in the US.

I think this is Facebook’s true sleight of hand: everyone is looking at Home and how they’re taking over the launcher and Android. Meanwhile they’re backdooring this VoIP technology that lets you call people using only wifi.

Facebook is asserting its primacy in the minds of millions of mobile users not only to dominate Android, but to put itself in a solid position to dominate carriers as well. Simple, user-friendly VoIP: one of the biggest and potentially most profound opportunities Google ever missed with Android.

I was right.

Oh, and in case you were worried, there will eventually be ads in Facebook Home.

I predict Facebook will announce a custom Android launcher — a “home” screen.

Update April 4, 2013: I was right.

I love that this is “news” at the Wall Street Journal. Perhaps the only news-worthy aspect of this story is that it’s one of those rare instances where Facebook is the one keeping up with the Joneses, instead of the other way around.

When will this vaunted hashtag implementation be completed? No one knows, despite WSJ's having talked to some of those ubiquitous and ever-informative “people familiar with the matter.”

What I think is really wonderful about this non-story is that it took not one but two people at WSJ to produce it, Evelyn M. Rusli and Shira Ovide. I don’t pretend to know the usual caliber of those journalists’ work, but I hope, for their sake, that the topic of this blurb is uncharacteristically dull.

Cotton Delo of Ad Age:

The targeting would hypothetically enable Coca-Cola to target to teenagers who’ve bought soda in the last month, or Pampers to show ads to North Carolina residents who’ve recently bought baby products, since Facebook’s own array of demographic and interest-based targeting options can be added to further refine audience segments. But adoption will be contingent on acceptance by corporate legal departments wary of becoming embroiled in a consumer privacy scare.

It’s not something I would rush into if I was one of those “corporate legal departments.” It’s not that I have some conspiracy theory about Facebook, or those data banks. I don’t. We give data to those data banks willingly when we use those discount cards. Shame on us for not reading the fine print.

And Facebook? They’re the same: the fact that nothing private is guaranteed to stay that way on the internet is common knowledge these days, and those who don’t know should know.

What would worry me as in-house counsel is what hackers will find when they inevitably get their hands on some of this data. In other words, Facebook and data banks are the devils we know. I would keep clients out of this plan because of the devils we don’t know.

I predict it will be panned because it’s not “sexy” enough for the expectations Facebook raised, but that it will also be widely-used. It looks to me like one of those things people don’t know they want until a company offers it to them. I’m excited to give it a try later on and I’ll probably write up more thoughts on it later.

It’s true, but not really because lots of people can follow Netflix CEO Reed Hastings on Facebook, but because many reporters actually do. This was not going to go unreported.

Josh Constine at TechCrunch:

There no big launch event yesterday because Facebook didn’t need one. In fact, it probably didn’t want one, considering it didn’t even notify bloggers like me as it usually does.

This isn’t going to end well. I predict that a backlash will build over the next couple of weeks, nothing dire, but familiar fare by now for Facebook. They should have come out with PR about the easy privacy controls they have implemented to allow seamless and secure photo uploading. Instead they tried to sneak it in on the weekend.

Dear MySpace:

I am happy to see you lean away from Facebook and toward the new Digg and Rdio, with a clean design that prizes whitespace as much as content. Give me something functional and pretty, without the spammy taste of Facebook or the learning curve of Google+. Do this for me, and I will proselytize for you, even in the face of hopelessness.

Sincerely,

Joe