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.

Does the Internet Really Make Everyone Crazy?

Even as I'm posting this, I often have this very question........ is the Internet making me CRAZY?! 
Somedays I think so and wonder if I would be better off without it!!! :)

Sociologists call them moral panics — when a population pins its unanchored fear in uncertain times on a selected demon, whether or not the target is really a threat to society. Drugs are a frequent focus of these societal anxiety attacks, but this week, Newsweek tries to foment a classic panic against a more universal foe: the Internet.

Headlined online “Is the Web Driving Us Mad?” the article begins with the story of Jason Russell, the filmmaker behind the “Kony2012″ video about the African cult-leader and warlord Joseph Kony. After the video went viral and suddenly brought Russell international fame, he wound up naked and ranting on a San Diego street corner. To make the case that the Internet caused Russell’s psychotic break, the Newsweek article rapidly generalizes from rare, extreme experiences like Russell’s and wends through a selective reading of the research to argue, in the words of one quoted source, that the Net, “encourages — and even promotes — insanity.”

According to senior writer Tony Dokoupil:

The first good, peer-reviewed research is emerging, and the picture is much gloomier than the trumpet blasts of Web utopians have allowed. The current incarnation of the Internet—portable, social, accelerated, and all-pervasive—may be making us not just dumber or lonelier but more depressed and anxious, prone to obsessive-compulsive and attention-deficit disorders, even outright psychotic. Our digitized minds can scan like those of drug addicts, and normal people are breaking down in sad and seemingly new ways.

The problem is, this conclusion runs counter to what the research data actually show.

Dokoupil makes much of brain scan studies suggesting that Internet use “rewires” the brain in ways that look similar to changes seen in drug addiction. The reality is that any enjoyable activity leads to changes in the brain’s pleasure regions if a person engages in it frequently enough. Indeed, any activity we perform repeatedly will lead to brain changes: that’s known as learning. Riding a bicycle and playing the violin also rewire the brain, but we don’t choose to refer to these changes as “damage.”

As yet, there is no brain scan that can clearly determine whether certain brain changes signify addiction or simple, harmless enjoyment. Nor can brain scans predict, in the case of addiction, who will be able to regain control over their behavior and who will not.

Dokoupil cites a study that scanned 24 people, some experienced Web users and some who were less proficient. He says that the regular users had “fundamentally altered prefrontal cortexes,” but he fails to mention that the research only explored people’s Google use — comparing Google aficionados to newbies. He writes further that just five hours of time spent online (using Google) “rewired” the brains of the new users. This, of course, tells us nothing about addiction: we don’t know if the experienced Google searchers were even having trouble controlling their Internet use, or whether, based on one small study, a tiny bit of experience learning how to search the Web can “rewire” the brain dramatically. If so, then everyone’s addicted — or no one is, and the brain changes are meaningless.

Dokoupil acknowledges that the research linking Web and smartphone use to psychiatric problems cannot show clear cause and effect, but he brushes off this important caveat with quotes from experts who conduct this research and use it to confirm their own clinical observations — in other words, anecdotes, which are an even sketchier source of data — and make causal claims.

In truth, the research linking Internet use to addiction, depression or other behavioral and psychiatric problems simply cannot determine whether being online causes these ills or whether people who are already prone to such problems tend to go online more. In fact, there’s better evidence (not mentioned in the article) that the Internet can be used to treat anxiety and depression than there is suggesting it causes these problems. Randomized controlled trials of online therapy for depression have found it to be as effective as traditional therapy — and only randomized controlled trials, not the observational data cited by Newsweek, can scientifically demonstrate cause and effect.

Dokoupil also approvingly cites an expert who has become a target of widespread ridicule in the science blogosphere for her extreme claims about Internet-related brain damage. Baroness Susan Greenfield, a pharmacology professor at Oxford, told Dokoupil in her typically understated way that the Internet problem “is an issue as important and unprecedented as climate change.”

Greenfield has never published a study on Internet use. The logic behind her claims is often befuddling: for example, this is how she attempted to explain why she believes the Internet has something to do with the recent rise in autism, in a 2011 interview with the Guardian: “I point to the increase in autism and I point to Internet use. That’s all.” Obviously, that is not scientific reasoning, which is why her comments inspired an Internet meme (among other outrage and disdain) that trended on Twitter.

Dr. Ben Goldacre, a leading British science journalist and author of the “Bad Science” blog, sums up the criticisms of Greenfield this way: “[Her ideas] are never set out as a clear hypothesis, in a formal academic publication, with the accompanying evidence and a clear suggestion of what research programmes might be planned to clarify any uncertainties.”

The Newsweek feature also highlights stories from China, Taiwan and Korea, where Internet addiction has been accepted as a genuine psychiatric problem and treatment centers have been set up to deal with it. “Tens of millions of people (and as much as 30 percent of teens) are considered Internet-addicted” in these countries, Dokoupil writes.

Those facts, however, don’t necessarily mean that Internet addiction exists, let alone that it is widespread. Simply naming a disease and treating it doesn’t make it real, no more than the existence of witch hunts proves the existence of witches. Indeed, some of the treatments used for Internet addiction, such as the abusive Internet treatment boot camps in China where several teens have died, suggest how easily the cure can become worse than the disease when unproven therapies for ill-defined problems spring up. (Boot camps have never been shown to help with any form of addiction.)

In fact, while expanding the diagnoses for addiction overall, the new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), psychiatry’s diagnostic manual, which will be published next year, rejected Internet addiction as a bona fide disorder. The Newsweek article spun this fact, highlighting instead that Internet addiction “will be included for the first time, albeit in an appendix tagged for “further study.’”

The truth is, we really don’t know much about how our online lives are affecting us. It’s quite possible that Internet use has the deleterious effects critics suggest — certainly some people do have difficulty controlling the amount of time they spend online. But is it the addictive effect of the Internet that keeps us checking our work emails on vacation or during evenings and weekends — or is it the fact that we fear we may lose our jobs if we don’t?

The Internet might indeed be a cause of our societal worries, but not necessarily because we’re addicted to it. And creating a moral panic based on flimsy evidence isn’t going to help, no matter what the real cause of our problems.