FindingSolo.com – An exploration of De facto Privacy and Online Data Mining – by “Sebastian P”

We’ve all seen the SNL skit for the “Damn it, my Mom is on Facebook filter,”  but what if the filter actually existed? Plenty of moms are on “the Facebook” and it certainly would be cool if there was an automated way to protect them from some of your more tasteless Facebook moments. On the other hand, similar software may allow advertisers to determine race or socio-economic status directly from photos or quickly determine what sports teams you follow based on wall posts and comments.  Employers could automatically pull suspicious content without the manpower needed to manually “stalk” potential hires. We explore the possibilities of such a filter at our site: FindingSolo.com.

On FindingSolo.Com, you’ll find two main products. The first, as our domain name implies, finds solo cups!

Coded in MATLAB, our solo cup detector knows when you’ve been partying. You simply run an image through its code and it’ll identify any solo cups present and replace them with more mom-friendly beverage containers.

We also created the Facebook Data Miner and Questionable Content Finder. A Google Chrome extension, the Facebook Data Miner adds a “Mine!” button to your Facebook page. Click “Mine!” to search for any questionable content on any profile page or news feed.

All of our code is released as an open-source project under GNU General Public License v3 (for more information about this license please click here). We have code repositories on code.google.com as well. You can find the links to them at http://www.findingsolo.com. On the website you can also view some cool screencasts demonstrating the software and giving instructions on how to download it for your own use.

Thanks, we hope you enjoy.

FindingSolo.Com Team:  Matthew Everts, Cameron Musco, Christopher Musco, Sebastian Park.