Facebook Knows About Changes To Your Relationship

     Facebook knows about the changes in your relationship - before you even tell the website.

     We all know Facebook collects personal data. The company tracks our locations, how often we post, what we post, what websites we visit, etc. What you might not know, perhaps, is that Facebook tracks our relationships. Now, according to an article posted Friday on mashable.com, Facebook can predict the status of our relationship before its public.

     Facebook has been collecting data about our relationships since 2010. They now have enough metrics, they say, to predict when a relationship will start, when it's at its peak, and when it will end, all based on the amount of times we post on our significant other's wall.

     I always knew to be cautious about what I post on Facebook, and I knew that Facebook collected some personal data. I did not know that Facebook stored that data, however. It's a big leap, at least in my mind, from keeping data that's relevant to website metrics and storing data for extraneous studies. I can't think of anything useful that would come from Facebook knowing about our relationship statuses - they aren't a part of our relationships, so why should they care what our personal relationship statuses are? I think this is the new beginning of 'privacy' on the Internet: everything we post, no matter how inconsequential, will be used for new "studies" that are actually just invasions of our privacy and personal lives.

If you want to read the mashable article it can be found here.