Your Facebook ‘Likes’ May Be More Revealing Than You Think

My facebook 'likes' reveal an awful lot about me according to a research study ... what do you think about this?

A study shows that what you ‘like’ on Facebook can predict, with remarkable accuracy, everything from your race to your sexual orientation, political affiliation and personality type.

Researchers studied more than 58,000 people who had volunteered to participate in the “myPersonality” application on Facebook, in which subscribers allowed access to their list of ‘likes,’ as well as the results of online personality tests that the scientists asked the participants to take. The researchers wanted to see whether such information, which is publicly available on many Facebook pages, could predict a number of aspects about Facebook users’ lives that they presumably kept to themselves, such as sexual orientation, ethnic origin, political views, religion, personality traits, substance use (including cigarettes, alcohol and drugs), and intelligence level.

Feeding people’s “likes” into an algorithm, information hidden in the lists of favorites predicted whether someone was white or African American with 95% accuracy, whether they were a gay male with 88% accuracy, and even identified participants as a Democrat or Republican with 85% accuracy.  The ‘likes’ list predicted gender with 93% accuracy and age could be reliably determined 75% of the time. The pattern of online liking predicted drug use with 65% accuracy and whether someone was likely to drink alcohol with 70% accuracy.

“The most important thing that we found is that you can predict a very wide variety of individual traits and preferences based on seemingly simple and generic types of records of online behavior like Facebook ‘likes,’” says Michal Kosinski, director of operations of the Psychometrics Centre at Cambridge University in England, a consultant for Microsoft on machine learning and the lead author of the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Some predictors were obvious: gay people were more likely to “like” anti-homophobia campaigns and Democrats liked Obama.  Others matched common stereotypes:  for example, gay men tended to like “Wicked The Musical” and Mac cosmetics and smart people were fans of “Science.”

But other connections were more puzzling and may require deeper analysis to understand fully — liking “curly fries” or “thunderstorms,” for example, was strongly linked with high intelligence while being a fan of the make-up store Sephora, liking the “I love being a mom” page or the Harley Davidson brand were linked with low intelligence.  Being a heterosexual male was oddly linked with liking “being confused after waking from naps.”

The links could be completely random or, alternatively, related to interactions that aren’t yet obvious, says Kosinski. But the benefit of such unbiased data crunching is that the associations may reveal relationships between preferences and behaviors that don’t always seem logical. “The thing about a computer is that it might be completely politically incorrect,” says Kosinski. “It wasn’t handpicked, it was done by an unsupervised computer and it does not have any stereotypes.”  (He says that he himself doesn’t like curly fries but does like Harley Davidsons.) For example, the curly fries connection, he says, “might be a cultural issue. Maybe there was a joke online [that circulated among] some kind of community of people of higher intelligence for some reason,” he suggests.

The study also found that likes were as strongly connected with some personality attributes, which were validated by the personality tests.  Openness to experience, which involves being excited by variety and newness and being intellectually curious, was predicted almost as well by the ‘likes’ as by directly measuring it with a psychological test supported by prior research.

As intriguing as the revelations are, however, the research also reveals troubling implications for privacy. In the study, Kosinski cited a situation in which retailers used such big data-based information and predicted which consumers were pregnant, and then provided them with discounts and coupons on baby-related products. But in one case, an expectant teen belonging to a culture in which pre-marital pregnancy isn’t accepted, and had not told her family,  found the flood of incentives intrusive and an invasion of privacy.

“Our results [also] show that these predictions could be potentially very intrusive,” says Kosinki, adding that he supports measures to avoid such problems. “There are technical ways to make sure that individuals have full control over their data, and technology can be designed in such a way that data cannot be abused.”

On the other hand, however, when it comes to research projects, the trove of data about human behavior now available online could spur new advances, even suggesting new areas of research.

That seemingly odd link between being a straight man and post-nap confusion, for example, could possibly result from some biological distinction between gay and straight men that was previously unknown. “This is just a hypothesis,” says Kosinki, noting that it could just as easily be a random result. Without this kind of data, however, it’s unlikely that anyone would even have thought to investigate such a possibility.

For now, the study clearly suggests that people should be aware of how companies and entities with whom they share “like” information may ultimately use this data — and more needs to be done to protect consumers from some of the more unscrupulous applications of such information. But understanding all the hidden meanings behind our desires could also end up teaching us a lot about ourselves.

Should Kids Under 13 Be on Facebook?

In a perfect, law-abiding world, no child under 13 has a Facebook account. But this world is pretty far from ideal, if the 7.5 million tweens — and younger kids — trolling the social-media behemoth are any gauge. Now, if Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg gets his way, that already impressive number will explode.

Zuckerberg told the NewSchools Venture Fund’s Summit in Burlingame, Calif., that he’d like younger children to be permitted to patronize his site. Technically, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) prohibits websites that gather data about users from allowing access to anyone younger than 13. In reality, though, COPPA is pretty ineffectual.

Consumer Reports (CR) recently announced results of an annual survey that found that “more than one-third of the 20 million minors who actively used Facebook in the past year” were under 13.

According to TIME.com’s Techland blog, “that number could be low, since it’s only based on parents who knew their underage kids were Facebook members:”

In fact CR found that over 5 million of Facebook’s 7.5 million-plus underage were as young as “10 and under.” … That’s not the worst of it. CR also found that underage kids using Facebook were unsupervised by parents. The site claims — not wrongly — that this exposes them to “malware or serious threats such as predators or bullies.”

Consider other points raised in the report like: 15% of all Facebook users post “their current location or travel plans,” 34% post their birth date in full, and 21% with children post their children’s names and pictures.

What about Facebook’s privacy controls, your bastion against all things nefarious? CR found “roughly one in five” weren’t using them.

Still Zuckerberg insists that connecting on Facebook — for educational purposes, natch — is a must for young kids. “That will be a fight we take on at some point,” CNNMoney quoted him as saying. “My philosophy is that for education you need to start at a really, really young age.”

Zuckerberg, not so far removed from the gawky age of 13 himself, says that Facebook has not begun researching how to open up the site to young kids and protect them at the same time. “Because of the restrictions we haven’t even begun this learning process,” he said. “If they’re lifted, then we’d start to learn what works. We’d take a lot of precautions to make sure that they [younger kids] are safe.”

Whew. That’s reassuring.

Still, it’s undeniable that kids simply don’t have the same powers of judgment as adults. Consider, for example, the New Hampshire teen who mourned on Facebook that Osama bin Laden hadn’t first offed her math teacher before he was killed. ”In hindsight, she’s mortified that she said that, but she’s a 13-year-old kid,” the girl’s mother, Kimberly Dell’isola, told a local television station.

That’s exactly why the publisher of Consumer Reports isn’t quite as cavalier as Zuckerberg about little ones friending and tagging to their hearts’ content. On Friday, the nonprofit Consumers Union worried that kids and teens don’t really get why it’s so important to self-censor what they share with the online world. “We urge Facebook to strengthen its efforts to identify and terminate the accounts of users under 13 years of age, and also to implement more effective age-verification methods for users signing up for new accounts,” Ioana Rusu, the regulatory counsel for Consumers Union, wrote in a letter to Zuckerberg.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Rusu’s letter came on the heels of a congressional hearing questioning the security of underage Facebook users:

Senate Commerce Committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) said it was “indefensible” that Facebook had only 100 employees monitoring the activities of its 600 million users.

At the hearing, Facebook Chief Technology Officer Bret Taylor said Facebook shuts down the accounts of people found to be lying about their age. But he acknowledged that Facebook depended on other users to report underage users.

The Consumers Union urged Facebook to be more “diligent and effective” at safeguarding the millions of minors who frequent the site. It suggested a few ways to do that: make minors’ default privacy setting one that facilitates sharing with “friends only” instead of “friends of friends;” for the average user, that amounts to nearly 17,000 people. And institute an “eraser button” that users can click to delete embarrassing information posted on the site when they were underage.

An eraser button? Should it actually be created, many adults will likely lobby to use it too.