Facebook Knows If You're Gay, Use Drugs, Or Are a Republican 473
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Not that there's anything wrong with that — as the Guardian reports that Facebook users are unwittingly revealing their sexual orientation, drug use and political beliefs– using only public 'like' updates. A study of 58,000 Facebook users in the US found that sensitive personal characteristics about people can be accurately inferred from information in the public domain. Researchers were able to accurately infer a Facebook user's race, IQ, sexuality, substance use, personality or political views (PDF) using only a record of the subjects and items they had 'liked' on Facebook – even if users had chosen not to reveal that information. 'It is good that people's behavior is predictable because it means Facebook can suggest very good stories on your news feed,' says Michal Kosinski, 'But what is shocking is that you can use the same data to predict your political views or your sexual orientation. This is something most people don't realize you can do.' For example, researchers were able to predict whether men were homosexual with 88% accuracy by their likes of Facebook pages such as 'Human Rights Campaign' and 'Wicked the Musical' – even if those users had not explicitly shared their sexuality on the site. According to the study other personality traits linked to predictive likes include for High IQ — 'The Godfather,' 'Lord of the Rings,' 'The Daily Show'; for Low IQ — 'Harley Davidson,' 'I Love Being A Mom,' 'Tyler Perry'; and for male heterosexuality — 'Wu Tang Clan,' 'Shaq,' and 'Being Confused after Waking Up from Naps.' Facebook's default privacy settings mean that your 'likes' are public to anyone and Facebook's own algorithms already use these likes to dictate what stories end up in users' news feeds, while advertisers can access them to determine which are the most effective ads to show you as you browse."
Re:Facebook knows that I like fisting? (Score:3, Informative)
Party Affiliation is Public Record (Score:2, Informative)
Political party affiliation is public record. Anyone can find out, There isn't any secretive voodoo to it.
Re:Base rates (Score:2, Informative)
You don't have that option in the test they did. They took a gay and a straight, and you (the mathematical model) had to determine which one was gay and which was straight. You can't apply your method to this test.
Yes you can. Define f(p1,p2,p3,p4,....p_n) = 1. For all properties of person p1 to p_n, if f = 1, then they are straight. Pretty accurate model. Doesn't tell you anything about the underlying phenomena though....or is this a tautology :) ....perhaps.....