Look before you ‘like’
A sign with Facebook's 'Like' logo is posted at Facebook headquarters near the office for the company's User Operations Safety Team in Menlo Park, California, USA. A study by researchers at Cambridge, published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has found that clicking Facebook's friendly blue 'like' buttons may reveal more about people than they realise. A sign with Facebook's 'Like' logo is posted at Facebook headquarters near the office for the company's User Operations Safety Team in Menlo Park, California, USA. A study by researchers at Cambridge, published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has found that clicking Facebook's friendly blue 'like' buttons may reveal more about people than they realise.
Washington - Those Facebook “likes” can reveal a lot more than you think.
Research released on Monday show patterns from these Facebook preferences can provide surprisingly accurate estimates of the user’s race, age, IQ, sexuality and other personal information.
Facebook said last year that roughly 2.7 billion new “likes” poured out on to the internet every day – endorsing everything from pop stars to cooldrinks. That means there is an ever-expanding pool of data available to marketers, managers and just about anyone else interested in users’ inner lives, especially those who aren’t careful about their privacy settings.
The researchers developed an algorithm which uses Facebook “likes” – which are publicly available unless a user chooses stronger privacy settings – to create personality profiles, potentially revealing a user’s intimate details.
These mathematical models proved to be 88 percent accurate for differentiating males from females and 95 percent accurate distinguishing race. The algorithms were also able to extrapolate information such as race, religion, sexual orientation, whether the user was a substance abuser, or even whether their parents had separated.
This data could be used for advertising and marketing, but it also could make users cringe because of the amount of personal data revealed, the researchers said.
“It’s very easy to click the ‘like’ button, it’s seductive,” said David Stillwell, a psychometrics researcher and co-author of the study with colleagues from Cambridge University and Microsoft Research.
“But you don’t realise that years later all those ‘likes’ are building up against you.”
Scientists studied 58 000 predominantly-US Facebook users who volunteered their “likes”, demographic profiles and psychometric testing results.
The study was published in the Proceedings of the Nation-al Academy of Sciences.
Stillwell had this advice for users: Look before you “like”.
For a lighter view of the research, the scientists created a Facebook app, “You Are What You Like”, which provides a user’s personality assessment. – Sapa-AFP