A couple of months ago I wrote about the relationship between IPOs and home prices. It was in response to the current wave of tech companies -- most of which are headquartered in San Francisco -- that have gone public or are expected to go public this year (2019). What impact will this have on the city's housing market?

I cited this academic study on the topic, which already discovered a "positive and significant association between local house price changes and firms going public." But today I stumbled upon another interesting study by a San Francisco real estate agent, name Deniz Kahramaner, who happens to also be a Stanford-trained data scientist.

What Kahramaner wanted to figure out was, who tends to buy residential real estate in San Francisco?

So he started with title data and then scraped the internet to try and match up individual buyer names with specific companies and industries. Since not everyone has some sort of public profile and because real estate is sometimes held within a company, he was only able to traceback about 55% of home purchases in San Francisco last year.

Still, the data looks pretty clear. About half of the homes bought in 2018 were by individuals whose employment has roots in "software." The next biggest buyer segment was "finance."

Here is an eye-opening article from data scientist Vicki Boykis outlining the number of ways in which Facebook collects data about its users. It’s called: What should you think about when using Facebook?

One of the more surprising tidbits from Boykis’ article is that Facebook collects keystrokes. That means if you start typing a status update but never actually post it, that information is still fair game.

Facebook previously used this data for a study on self-censorship. That sounds like like a fascinating study, but I’m sure the thought is also scaring many of you if you care about privacy.

Here is a quote from the article that gets at the core of what is going on:

“The fundamental purpose of most people at Facebook working on data is to influence and alter people’s moods and behaviour. They are doing it all the time to make you like stories more, to click on more ads, to spend more time on the site.”

A worthwhile read. And in case you didn’t already know, if you go to Settings -> Download a copy of your Facebook data, you can get a pretty good dump of your activity, including every private message you’ve ever sent on the platform.