Facebook Likes Reveal Gender, Ethnicity, Religion, Political Persuasion, and More
We leave a digital trail behind us all the time. Even what you like, can reveal something about you. New research by the University of Cambridge and Microsoft Research analyzed Facebook likes to see just how much information they contain. And after collecting data using apps like MyPersonality, computer scientists were able to find a whole lot of things.
Stuff like gender, ethnicity, religion, political persuasion and more. This comes with 80 percent accuracy. You can browse the entire data set yourself on a public wiki. The Wall Street Journal gives some specific examples:
As a measure of the computer model's accuracy, the researchers were able to distinguish between Democrats and Republicans in 85% of the cases; between black and white people in 95% of the cases; and between homosexual and heterosexual men in 88% of the cases.
The results were published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. From the Wall Street Journal:The researchers found... that "Likes" for Austin, Texas; "Big Momma" movies; and the statement "Relationships Should Be Between Two People Not the Whole Universe" were among a set of 10 choices that, combined, predicted drug use. Meanwhile, "Likes" for swimming, chocolate-chip cookie-dough ice cream and "Sliding On Floors with Your Socks On" were part of a pattern predicting that a person didn't use drugs.
