Everytime thatyou click on a “Like” in the social network Facebookyou are leaving a trace of your personality and your preferences, as suggested today by an article published in the prestigious magazinePNAS. Its authors, experts from the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom), demonstrate in a massive study with 58,000 users that it is possible to find out the age, race, level of intelligence, sexual tendency, political preferences, drug use, religion, basic personality traits and other information of any Internet user automatically tracking and analyzing what content stands out with a “Like” when browsing through Facebook. Something to keep in mind given that this information is public by default if the privacy criteria are not changed.
Specifically, the models used by researchers at the University of Cambridge Psychometric Center, who worked in collaboration with Microsoft, reveal that it is possible to predict sexual tendencies with 88% accuracy, and to distinguish a Republican from a Democrat without error. in 85% of the cases. The software also predicts whether a user is Christian or Muslim with an 82% accuracy rate. And if you are single, married or widowed with a somewhat lower precision, of 65%.
Some of the relationships identified in the study are quite strange, such as the link between a fondness for curly fries and a high score on IQ tests. Others seem more obvious: for example, they found that those who preferred the singer Jennifer Lopez usually had more friends on Facebook than fans of Iron Maiden.
In any case, the authors remind users that although sharing individual likes or pages does not seem particularly intrusive, it allows users to be categorized and their behavior predicted in much more personal and sensitive areas than we usually believe.
