Sexuality, political leanings and even intelligence can begleaned (почерпнуть) from the things you choose to "like" on Facebook, a study suggests.
Researchers at Cambridge University used algorithms to predict religion, politics, race and sexual orientation.
The research, published in the journal PNAS, forms surprisingly accurate (точный) personal portraits, researchers said.
The findings should "ring alarm (тревожный) bells" for users, privacy campaigners (кампании) said.
The study used 58,000 volunteers who alongside their Facebook "likes" and demographic information also provided psychometric testing results - designed to highlight personality traits.
The Facebook likes were fed into algorithms and matched with the information from the personality tests.
The algorithms proved 88% accurate for determining male sexuality, 95% accurate in distinguishing African-American from Caucasian-American and 85% for differentiating Republican from Democrat.
Christians and Muslims were correctly classified in 82% of cases and relationship status and substance abuse was predicted with an accuracy between 65% and 73%. The links clicked rarely explicitly revealed these attributes. Fewer than 5% of gay users clicked obvious likes such as gay marriage, for instance.
Instead, the algorithms aggregated huge amounts of likes such as music and TV shows to create personal profiles.
It also threw up some strange pairings.
"Curly fries correlated with high intelligence and people who liked the Dark Knight tended to have fewer Facebook friends," said research author David Stillwell.
Do you like social networks ? What is the most popular network in our days, in your opinion ? Do you believe "likes" in social networks can tell a lot about a person ? Do you think social network is a kind of drug ? Is it true social networks is the main problem of generation ?
In my opinion, it is absolutely true that social networks can characterize a person by his preferences. Any person in the world can find a lot of information about you. A personality of the person has ceased to be confidential. On the one hand, the social network is a large progress in our days, on the other hand, it displaces a real life. Moreover, it takes much time.
From my point of view, not only "likes" can help to know about a person in any social network. It can prove any of the apps in Google Play, for example. You can see that some of these apps collect a lot of information. For example, it is your location. It's true that a personality of the person has ceased to be confidential.
