Facebook is turning matchmaker. Is this a good thing?By Aime Williams
The world’s most successful social-media platform began as a rudimentary “hot or not” site. Facemash, created by Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg, presented viewers with random pairs of student photographs he’d scraped from the university’s intranet, and asked them to rate who was the more attractive. The site was shut down but Zuckerberg is now returning to his dorm-room roots. Earlier this year, he announced that Facebook would launch a dating service.
This makes sense for the company but might leave users a little queasy. I’ve used Facebook since 2007; it has 10 years of my posts, status updates, chats and photos to analyse. It’s becoming clear that we don’t know the extent to which Facebook monitors us, but it certainly holds a huge amount of data on us. Think of all the excruciating private messaging its algorithms will have at its disposal if people use it to find a date.