Facebook and Other Tech Companies Spending Millions of Dollars to Create Technology Capable of Reading Your Mind, and They’re Succeeding

In 2017, Facebook announced that it wanted to create a headband that would let people type at a speed of 100 words per minute, just by thinking.

It is a sobering reality when you come to the startling conclusion that Facebook is not a product, no, not by a long shot. To paraphrase that classic line from ‘It’s A Wonderful Life‘, Facebook isn’t selling, they’re buying. What are they purchasing? You. You’re the product field they have purchased for the purpose of cultivating and harvesting.

“Now this man purchased a field with the reward of iniquity; and falling headlong, he burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out. And it was known unto all the dwellers at Jerusalem; insomuch as that field is called in their proper tongue, Aceldama, that is to say, The field of blood.” Acts 1:18,19 (KJV)

The list of stories that we have done warning you about Facebook stretch far and wide on this site. We told you how they launched their own cryptocurrency in a bid to become a global money source. We told about the psychological experiments they have already been caught conducting, and we told how about how Mark Zuckerberg is calling for the creation of the New World Order based around social media.

A Few Surprising Facts About Facebook:

• How many employees does Facebook currently have:  39,651 as of June 30, 2019, an increase of 31% year-over-year.
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• What is the mission of Facebook:  “Founded in 2004, Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. People use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family, to discover what’s going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to them.”
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• Worldwide, there are over 2.41 billion monthly active users (MAU) as of June 2019. This is an 8 percent increase in Facebook MAUs year over year.  This is compared to 2.38 billion MAUs for Q1 2019. (Source: Facebook 7/24/19) Facebook is simply too big to ignore as an on-going part of your digital marketing communications program.  Please note the last item on this list for the total number of people who now use Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or Messenger every day on average.
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• 1.59 billion people on average log onto Facebook daily and are considered daily active users (Facebook DAU) for June 2019.  This represents an 8 percent increase year over year (Source: Facebook as 7/24/19).  Sixty-six percent of Facebook’s audience would be considered DAU versus Monthly Active Users (MAU).  The Implication: A huge and vastly growing number of Facebook users are active and consistent in their visits to the site, making them a promising audience for your marketing efforts.
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• Five new profiles are created every second. The Implication: Your potential audience on Facebook is growing exponentially.
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• Photo uploads total 300 million per day. (Source: Gizmodo) The Implication: Again, this is an indication of engaged users; also, it is an indication there are a lot of photos, as well as other information, competing for users’ attention, so target your efforts strategically.
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• 4.75 billion pieces of content shared daily as of May 2013 which is a 94 percent increase from August 2012. (Source: Facebook)

If it’s still not clear, let me spell it out for you – the Internet in general and Facebook in particular is the One World System. It is being assembled every hour of every day, and you and I are helping them do it. That’s how close this world is right now to the Antichrist and his Mark of the Beast coming on the scene. Thank God the Rapture of the Church comes first. But man oh man, it’s going to come right down to the wire in an amazing prophetical photo-finish.

Facebook is funding brain experiments to create a device that can access your brain and reads your mind

FROM TECHNOLOGY REVIEW: Now, a little over two years later, the social-media giant is revealing that it has been financing extensive university research on human volunteers. Today, some of that research was described in a scientific paper from the University of California, San Francisco, where researchers have been developing “speech decoders” able to determine what people are trying to say by analyzing their brain signals.

The research is important because it could help show whether a wearable brain-control device is feasible and because it is an early example of a giant tech company being involved in getting hold of data directly from people’s minds.

To some neuro-ethicists, that means we are going to need some rules, and fast, about how brain data is collected, stored, and used. In the report published today in Nature Communications, UCSF researchers led by neuroscientist Edward Chang used sheets of electrodes, called ECoG arrays, that were placed directly on the brains of volunteers.

The scientists were able to listen in in real time as three subjects heard questions read from a list and spoke simple answers. One question was “From 0 to 10, how much pain are you in?” The system was able to detect both the question and the response of 0 to 10 far better than chance. 

Another question asked was which musical instrument they preferred, and the volunteers were able to answer “piano” and “violin.” The volunteers were undergoing brain surgery for epilepsy.

Facebook says the research project is ongoing, and that is it now funding UCSF in efforts to try to restore the ability to communicate to a disabled person with a speech impairment. Eventually, Facebook wants to create a wearable headset that lets users control music or interact in virtual reality using their thoughts.

To that end, Facebook has also been funding work on systems that listen in on the brain from outside the skull, using fiber optics or lasers to measure changes in blood flow, similar to an MRI machine. Such blood-flow patterns represent only a small part of what’s going on in the brain, but they could be enough to distinguish between a limited set of commands.

“Being able to recognize even a handful of imagined commands, like ‘home,’ ‘select,’ and ‘delete,’ would provide entirely new ways of interacting with today’s VR systems—and tomorrow’s AR glasses,” Facebook wrote in a blog post.

Facebook has plans to demonstrate a prototype portable system by the end of the year, although the company didn’t say what it would be capable of, or how it would measure the brain.

Privacy Questions

Research on brain-computer interfaces has been speeding up as rich tech companies jump in. On July 16, Neuralink, a brain interface company formed by SpaceX founder Elon Musk, said it hoped to implant electrodes into the brains of paralyzed volunteers within two years.

However, the public has reason to doubt whether tech companies can be trusted with a window into their brains. Last month, for example, Facebook was hit with a record $5 billion fine for deceiving customers about how their personal information gets used.

“To me the brain is the one safe place for freedom of thought, of fantasies, and for dissent,” says Nita Farahany, a professor at Duke University who specializes in neuro-ethics. “We’re getting close to crossing the final frontier of privacy in the absence of any protections whatsoever.”

Facebook emphasizes that all the brain data collected at UCSF will stay at the university, but Facebook employees are able to go there to study it. It’s not known how much money Facebook is providing the university nor how much volunteers know about the company’s role. A university spokesman, Nicholas Weiler, declined to provide a copy of the research contract or the consent forms signed by patients. He said the consent forms list Facebook among several potential sponsors of the research.

While a brain reader could be a convenient way to control devices, it would also mean Facebook would be hearing brain signals that could, in theory, give it much more information, like how people are reacting to posts and updates.

“Brain data is information-rich and privacy sensitive, it’s a reasonable concern,” says Marcello Ienca, a brain-interface researcher at ETH in Zurich. “Privacy policies implemented at Facebook are clearly insufficient.”

Facebook says it will do better with brain data. “We take privacy very seriously,” says Mark Chevillet, who leads the brain reading project at Facebook. READ MORE

Why Elon Musk, Facebook and MIT Are Betting On Mind-Reading Technology

Elon Musk, Facebook, MIT, and a 16-year-old inventor are in the race to read minds with computers. Currently, researchers can detect brainwaves and track electromagnetic pulses within the neurons in our brains. Will this technology completely change humanity and what it means to be human? Big players like Elon Musk and Facebook have teased their entrance into a market that’s expected to reach $1.72B by 2022. New research is pouring out of universities like Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The University of California in San Francisco.

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