Research Tool Shows How Your Facebook Loves to Reveal Your Identity
Facebook is full of tools that claim to tell you about your personality. Most of them are obviously crap. However, the University of Cambridge has created an app that analyzes your Facebook likes to reveal the type of demographic information a company might learn about you.
Sharing your information with a large company like Facebook can cause a little paranoia . To make matters worse, you probably don’t understand very well what the social network can actually figure out with all this data. Created for research by organizational behavior professor Michal Kosinski, this tool showcases some of the types of information that only your Facebook likes can reveal.
The information is not 100% accurate, but is probably a little more detailed than one would expect. Basic analysis can show age, gender (shown as a psychological spectrum, not a binary flag), personality traits, political views, and topics in which you were educated. Most of the information returned is displayed as percentiles (which means it may not be specific to you, but consistent with your general psychodemographic). While there isn’t much you can do about it, it’s a handy way to quickly get a sense of how the social media mining machines are looking at you.
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