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Facebook is watching you more closely than you think

By Koh Wanzi - on 30 Jun 2015, 11:12am

Facebook is watching you more closely than you think

Image Source: Facebook

As part of its effort to refine your newsfeed, Facebook has announced that it will track fine-grained information about how you watch video, like whether you turn up the volume or watch the video in full screen.

Facebook is really upping the ante here as it looks beyond overt user engagement statistics like shares, comments and likes to gauge how much users enjoy the content showing up on their newsfeeds. Earlier this month, Facebook said that it would begin tracking how much time users spent reading a story in their newsfeed to assess their content preferences.

Facebook said it would track this statistic in relation to how long users spent on other newsfeed stories, thus accounting for factors like slow internet connections and different reading speeds.

User engagement statistics like shares, comments and likes often don't tell the full story. (Image Source: Facebook)

Today’s announcement means that it’s now extending a similar tracking initiative to video. Facebook is probably right in saying that if someone plays a video on full screen or watches it in high-definition, they are most likely interested in the video.

Facebook already tracks how often you watch newsfeed videos and for how long in order to tweak the prominence of videos in your feed. Its latest move will now fine-tune this further by trying to show you the type of videos you actually want to watch.

According to Facebook, these broader tracking initiatives are a result of surveys indicating that traditional engagement statistics are not necessarily the be-all and end-all of gauging how relevant a particular story is to a certain user.

We wouldn’t be surprised if some users feel a little discomfited by this. What this means is that even if you choose to be a complete lurker and use Facebook without actually engaging with anyone, the social network might still know what you’re up to.

We also can’t help but think that this is part of Facebook’s efforts to lock you into its ecosystem. More relevant feeds are great, but by doing this Facebook ensures that you won’t have to look elsewhere to get your news. In fact, it launched Instant Articles expressly for this purpose, so users can get both updates about their family, friends, and the world right from within Facebook itself.

Facebook's Instant Articles wants to deliver news from publishers like The New York Times and National Geographic within Facebook's newsfeed. (Image Source: Facebook)

Nevertheless, this expanded tracking is still a somewhat experimental feature and Facebook isn’t yet implementing this on a wide-scale. It will slowly roll it out over the coming weeks, but the majority of users will probably not see significant changes to their newsfeeds.

Source: Facebook

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