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{Facebook Home page screen grab}
Pamela Chan, BCFamily.ca/Editorial
Your children are better off without God.
No wait – they’re better off with God.
While we are it, get thee to a job Stay at Home Moms. Your daughters will be more successful and your sons will be more empathetic – according to a Harvard University study.
Hold on.
News from Stanford University is showing the benefits of having a Stay at Home parent.
Clearly I must click on these links frequently because the Facebook algorithm has decided that I want to see more – much more – of these pieces.
And so it goes on my Facebook homepage. One piece butts up against another. One update bashes the leader of the political party that the poster of the previous post praised. Leader of party X will take Canada down a deep hole. But another poster has already informed me that that hole is pretty crowded because Leader Y is already in it.
After taking an online survey that was designed by University of Cambridge researchers to analyze my Facebook likes, I found out that I was born in a completely different generation. Another data mining programme had my level of enthusiasm for all things spiritual completely opposite from what it actually is. Not only could I become deeply confused if I took every heartfelt post shared on social media to heart, but the people mining my own data must be all in a muddle.
How about you? What’s the state of affairs on your social media home page?
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I installed NoScript and BetterPrivacy add-ons on my browser so I choose what third-party scripts and data mining trackers and cookies to accept.Twitter keeps a Locally Shared Object cookie after I log in so it matches “suggested accounts” with topics or people on pages in other tabs on the browser.
Locally shared objects, which can be stored or retrieved whenever a user accesses a page containing a Flash application, are a form of local storage. Similar to that of cookies, they can be used to store user preferences, save data from Flash games, or to track users’ Internet activity.
Users may also delete local shared objects either manually or using third-party software. For instance, BetterPrivacy, a Firefox add-on, or CCleaner, a standalone computer program for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X, allow users to delete local shared objects on demand.