Barry Ritholtz:

Facebook is valued at “plenty”

By Wall Street’s tech cognoscenti,

Take 1 billion friends

Times 5 dollars, then

Times IPO multiple: 20!

— Limericks Économiques

Last week, I made a surprising discovery about Facebook: It has far fewer “active” users than it claims. I learned this from a note buried deep in the company’s S1 — the IPO document it filed with the SEC in order to go public. Based on its S1, the social-networking giant’s value is probably much less than most investors seem to think.

One advantage of working in finance is that you get to meet lots of very nice, really smart people such as David Wilson, who writes the Chart of the Day column for Bloomberg. His column is my Sudoku, as I challenge myself to poke holes in the correlations it identifies between various assets. It’s good wonky fun.

On Feb. 3, the column used Facebook’s SEC data to show how fast the firm was growing. FB was becoming a “daily habit for more users,” and the numbers from the IPO filing were extraordinary: 845 million Monthly Active Users and 483 million Daily Active Users.

Ateqah Khaki:

“As technology advances, so does the government’s surveillance powers. If we want to protect our privacy rights, the exercise of this power has to be subject to limits,” writes ACLU deputy legal director Jameel Jaffer in The New York Times “Room for Debate” discussion about the use of drones domestically, and whether they pose a threat to privacy.

As a recent report we issued makes clear, the ACLU believes it is crucial that we adopt clear rules for the use of drones to conduct domestic surveillance. Jaffer writes,