Researchers at Cambridge University are using algorithms to predict religion, political stance, race and sexual orientation from the things one “likes” on Facebook. The research provides quite accurate personal portraits.

Over 58 000 volunteers were used for the study, and provided their Facebook “likes” as well as demographic information. These volunteers also provided psychometric testing results to highlight personality traits.

The algorithms proved 88% accurate when determining male sexuality, 95% accurate in distinguishing African-American from Caucasian-American, and 85% accurate when distinguishing Democrat from Republican.

In 82% of the cases, Muslims and Christians were correctly classified.

Research author,  David Stillwell said the algorithms also created some strange pairings.

Curly fries correlated with high intelligence and people who liked the Dark Knight tended to have fewer Facebook friends.

This study is music to the ears of the social media firms wanting to make money off of customers from personalised marketing.

Some of the researchers also spoke of the disadvantages and implications of the study. Michael Kosinski, lead researcher on the project said:

I appreciate automated book recommendations, or Facebook selecting the most relevant stories for my newsfeed. 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.

Stillwell stressed that the implications reach beyond social media, to digital records of browsing history to search queries. Nick Pickles, Director of pirvacy campaign group, Big Brother Watch said:

This research should ring alarm bells for anyone who thinks that privacy settings are the solution to protecting information online. We need to fundamentally re-think how much data we are voluntarily sharing.

Sharing individual likes or pages might not seem hugely intrusive, but it allows individuals to be categorised and behaviour predicted in areas that are far more personal and sensitive than people realise.

Yet again, it is clear the lack of transparency about how users’ data is being used will lead to entirely justified fears about our data being exploited for commercial gain.

[Source: BBC News]