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Facebook Data Mining & The Long Weekend Round-up

After the long weekend, this episode is a bit of a round up. Nothing big jumping out but a few minor issues to address.

Facebook Data Mining & The Long Weekend Round-up

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Reasonably Accurate 馃馃 Transcript

Morning. How's everyone doing today? Um After a nice long weekend, a little bit of a break for um Easter slash April fools. Um Hopefully you guys disconnected. I know I did, I was offline most of the weekend, which was really refreshing, kind of nice.

Um Not to see what was going on. Um Though, of course, there's always a ton of stuff going on. Uh Let me just adjust this a little bit more and see how we're doing. We go, yeah, that's good. We're good. All right.

So um a couple of things I want to talk about uh finally finish that Facebook data download tool. Um Just putting it up on github right now, create a new repository for that as well as finishing up a medium post on it.

Um Obviously, that will be on market dot C as well. Um And really just go through um you know, the simplicity of what insights are out of that tool out of that data dump. So when you download your data from Facebook, there's a very minimal web interface we talked about this last week and you can see, you know, OK, this photo was posted this video was posted these kinds of things.

Not um exactly the uh insights, yikes, um not exactly the same insights that the social network is working with. Um So the idea of this tool is simply to let you know um what they can see and give you some ability to do further analysis yourself.

So very simple, straightforward tool, what it ends up doing is it, you know, it's a Python script, use a standard library for Python three for the vast majority of the functionality. It does everything locally. So there's no privacy or security issues.

You point it at your data dump. It's going to either unzip it or act on it if it's already open and it's going to strip out a whole bunch of insights and spit out a bunch of common separated values that you can import to Excel or use a tool like Amazon quick site or Tableau or whatever your weapon of choice is for visualization.

Um If you have base map installed from map Plot Lib, which is a Python library, it will actually spit out some maps, which I have a video already done for my own location information. And I think it's, you'll be kind of surprised that how much information is you're able to pull out of the data dub.

So I think the data dump is a good effort from Facebook's part. It's been there for a few years, but it's kind of the and that you see this stuff and you go OK. Um You know, here's the photos, here's the timeline, this is what Facebook knows about me.

Um There's a whole bunch of insights you can pull from that data that aren't really ready to apparent. And the goal of the tool that I'm pushing out is to show you those insights. Um You know, there's people who have written about this before, it's nothing revolutionary, but I think it will be eye opening for some folks.

Um And I'll have that up. Um I'm not giving you date because I keep telling you to from a group nursing, but realistically the tools, the codes done, it works great. Um I'm putting it up on github uh Just before I put this out.

Um And then I'm polishing off that blog post that I've got another blog post going out um to get ready for RS A in a couple of weeks. So, um a little bit of writing today. Uh Other thing I wanted to talk about was um but a lot of networks are cracking down on IC Os on initial coin offerings and supporting them through their services.

So, um no social media, no web extensions, no advertising. That's a great thing. The vast majority of IC OS are scams, you should probably avoid them. Um And then there's been some, um you know, there wasn't any real major news over the weekend around security.

Um Other than, you know, the privacy stuff that's still going on. Um, there was a breach this morning, um, that's been reported and it kind of reiterated that we really need, you know, maybe it's time for this message again and it's kind of hard to keep hitting on the same message, but how to handle responsible disclosure.

Um, when a security researcher reports, something to you or a user reports, something to you, how do you handle that? How do you appropriately deal with that and then get ahead of breach notifications. And I had actually answered um some journalist questions yesterday about the H BC and S 1/5 Avenue breach.

Um that happened, that's the other thing that happened this weekend. Um And you know, it's, it's difficult as a company to accept the fact that you need to go against your sort of normal marketing playbook or your normal pr playbook.

But when it comes to security issues, the truth is going to get out there, the data is going to be leaked and, and people are going to know that there was a breach to get ahead of that message, I think is absolutely critical.

So it might be time to write um another uh sort of, or I don't think I've actually written a whole cohesive one, but to write it like, hey, this is how you can handle data breaches um from apr perspective, from a columnist perspective.

Um and you know, just be open and honest and yeah, it's gonna hurt. But if you're, if you kind of tackle it by the horns and, and are up front about it, it'll hurt a lot less than trying to, um, you know, spin it in your favor.

Uh, because, you know, we've seen tons of examples over the last few years of people trying to spin. It doesn't work. Um, other than that, uh, keeping it real brief today, I did want to call out um something I've read uh over the last few days or a few weeks.

I think it has been um colleague and friend Rick Ferguson um on Twitter, uh Rick uh Rik underscore Ferguson. Um and I'll link to him in the comments. Um He's written a four part series on medium that is absolutely fantastic looking at sort of cybercrime trends issues and impact on society.

Um Rick is a phenomenal writer. He's a great speaker, great guy all around, but uh his, uh his writing is really worth reading. Um You know, he, he delivers his points with eloquence and it's definitely worth reading that four part series again.

I'll link to that below. So keeping this super brief today, uh look for some more stuff from me this week. Of course, I'll update you here on Mornings with Mark. Always hit me up and I think I got it right.

Yeah, I got it right. Um marknca on Twitter. Uh You know, I can do 1000 of these episodes that will still be, which side did I get it? Right and check that. I don't think that habit is ever gonna drop.

Uh But anyway, uh hit me up online at marknca uh happy to chat, happy to chat down here in the comments below. I hope you are setting up for a fantastic day. Um And I will talk to you guys tomorrow.

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