Facebook 'Likes' give your secrets away
Courtesy TGDaily.com:
by Emma Woollacott
Researchers at the University of Cambridge say that, using publicly-available Facebook Likes only, it's possible to get surprisingly accurate estimates of users’ race, age, IQ, sexuality, personality, substance use and political views.
"I am a great fan and active user of new amazing technologies, including Facebook. I appreciate automated book recommendations, or Facebook selecting the most relevant stories for my newsfeed," says said Michal Kosinski, Operations Director at Cambridge's Psychometric Centre.
"However, I can imagine situations in which the same data and technology is used to predict political views or sexual orientation, posing threats to freedom or even life."
The team analysed a dataset of over 58,000 US Facebook users, who volunteered their Likes, demographic profiles and psychometric testing results through the myPersonality application.
Facebook Likes were fed into algorithms and cross-checked with information from profiles and personality tests. The researchers then created statistical models able to predict personal details using Facebook Likes alone.
Their models, they say, proved 88 percent accurate for determining male sexuality, 95 percent accurate in distinguishing African-American from Caucasian American and 85 percent accurate differentiating Republican from Democrat. Christians and Muslims were correctly classified 82 percent of the time, and even relationship status and substance abuse could be accurately predicted between 65 and 73 percent of the time.
This information, though, didn't come from obvious Likes such as 'gay marriage', but relied on inference - aggregating huge amounts of less informative but more popular Likes such as music and TV shows.
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