Armed With Facebook 'Likes' Alone, Researchers Can Tell Your Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation - Rebecca J. Rosen - The Atlantic
Have you Facebook liked The Godfather, The Daily Show, “Morgan Freeman’s Voice,” To Kill a Mockingbird, and (bizarrely) curly fries? If you said yes to each of those, then you really need to lay off liking things on Facebook. Also, you’re probably intelligent, at least as would be established on a basic personality test. With remarkable accuracy, researchers from the University of Cambridge and Microsoft have been able to discern people’s gender, sexuality, age, race, and political affiliation, based solely on their Facebook likes. With significantly less accuracy, they’ve also tried to predict certain personality traits — e.g. intelligence, satisfaction with life, emotional stability, conscientiousness — and though such traits were harden to predict, the researchers were able to come up with lists of “most predictive Likes” for each. It’s possible to see how, with a much larger corpus, even certain subtleties of personality could be recognized deep within the idiosyncratic data of Facebook likes. The authors, Michal Kosinski, David Stillwell, and Thore Graepel, say the results demonstrate “how accurate and potentially intrusive such a predictive analysis can be.” By default, Facebook likes are public information, but you can change that with a few moments’ effort.
