Hot off the heels of the Cambridge Analytics debacle, as well as the drama about the millions of private posts being accidentally exposed, the social media platform is causing another hullabaloo.

This time, it has apparently figured out a way to tell when their users are about to die.

I repeat – Facebook is working on ways to predict when you’re about to bite the dust.

The Independent with the scoop:

The Predicting Life Changes patent, first uncovered by The New York Times, describes a “life change prediction engine” that predicts major events in a Facebook user’s life.

This might include a change in marital status, birthdays, new jobs, the birth of children, graduation, or death.

“The life change prediction engine computes the probability of a user undergoing a life change event using a machine learning model and historical data of other users of the social networking system who have went through life change events,” the patent states.

WTF, Facebook, that’s just creepy.

The reason they created this engine is a familiar one – for advertising purposes:

By knowing the most intimate details of a person’s life, the social network would be able to serve them with highly-relevant adverts.

So by figuring out when you’re giving up the ghost, Facebook will know what kind of adverts to show you before then, and when to stop when that eventually happens.

Thanks for considering our needs, Mark Zuckerberg.

Although users have the option to keep info about special life events private, Facebook’s patent has subtle methods to find them out.

The patent states:

Beyond simple reliance on a change in user profile information, the described approach is better able to use all the information contained in the social networking system such as wall posts, instant messages, email messages, etc., to determine whether a user has undergone a life change event and/or predict whether a user will undergo a life change event at a future time.

That means having to watch what you write, like typing the word “congratulations”, or making a post about that fancy hotel you visited while on vacation.

Scarily enough, it’s not the only patent that the social media platform has filed:

Other patent applications uncovered by The New York Times include one that can spy on users through their phone’s microphone.

In this scenario, the microphone listens to what TV show a person is watching to suggest relevant content.

This just shows the lengths Facebook is going to in order to harvest data from their users, although their PR team is telling people that these patent applications plans aren’t concrete plans for the future.

Still, it’s pretty friggin’ terrifying knowing that this platform, which some use to escape reality for a while, has the power to figure out when you’re about to snuff it.

At times like this, I wonder why I didn’t listen to Jim Carrey and delete my Facebook account already.

[source:independent]