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Facebook Knows If You're Gay, Use Drugs, Or Are a Republican
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Not that there's anything wrong with that — as the Guardian reports that Facebook users are unwittingly revealing their sexual orientation, drug use and political beliefs– using only public 'like' updates. A study of 58,000 Facebook users in the US found that sensitive personal characteristics about people can be accurately inferred from information in the public domain. Researchers were able to accurately infer a Facebook user's race, IQ, sexuality, substance use, personality or political views (PDF) using only a record of the subjects and items they had 'liked' on Facebook – even if users had chosen not to reveal that information. 'It is good that people's behavior is predictable because it means Facebook can suggest very good stories on your news feed,' says Michal Kosinski, 'But what is shocking is that you can use the same data to predict your political views or your sexual orientation. This is something most people don't realize you can do.' For example, researchers were able to predict whether men were homosexual with 88% accuracy by their likes of Facebook pages such as 'Human Rights Campaign' and 'Wicked the Musical' – even if those users had not explicitly shared their sexuality on the site. According to the study other personality traits linked to predictive likes include for High IQ — 'The Godfather,' 'Lord of the Rings,' 'The Daily Show'; for Low IQ — 'Harley Davidson,' 'I Love Being A Mom,' 'Tyler Perry'; and for male heterosexuality — 'Wu Tang Clan,' 'Shaq,' and 'Being Confused after Waking Up from Naps.' Facebook's default privacy settings mean that your 'likes' are public to anyone and Facebook's own algorithms already use these likes to dictate what stories end up in users' news feeds, while advertisers can access them to determine which are the most effective ads to show you as you browse."
You can tell that just by talking to people.
They have a job for you at Facebook.
Turns out, I'm gay. Even Facebook knew it before I did.
The highest intelligence indicator were the users who ignored everything, revealed very little and never "liked" anything - knowing that anything they did on facebook would be mined and used for metrics and marketing.
. .
if that "Honey-Boo-Boo like" on Facebook will lower my IQ score...
Karma: Bad
One day you will "like" something wrong...
I figure over-reliance on this sort of analysis explains why Facebook will show me ads for dating services even though it knows I'm married. I like all this geeky stuff, so obviously the advertisers assume I'm single.
Which is why I hit the "like" button for EVERYTHING!!!!!
FYI, I wouldn't recommend drinking from that well, considering how much I piss in it.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
I can do better than 88% accuracy at guessing if people are homosexual by guessing "no" every time.
I figure over-reliance on this sort of analysis explains why Facebook will show me ads for dating services even though it knows I'm married. I like all this geeky stuff, so obviously the advertisers assume I'm single.
That is of course one possible explanation... try again.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
You and me both, I've convinced Google that I'm a gay male yoga instructor.
Also, I've been shaving since 2004.
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
How does gay male yoga differ from normal yoga?
Ezekiel 23:20
found that sensitive personal characteristics about people can be accurately inferred from information in the public domain.
I've done this stuff, for both ad targeting and music targeting, and I understand the math. Knowing whether you are gay is just the tip of the iceberg.
From the data it can be inferred whether you believe Bradley Manning was justified, whether you think it is treason for a politician to support warrantless surveillance, and whether you believe the "four boxes" epigram is relevant in the current context.
It can be inferred how you react to various turns of phrase, which ways of presenting an idea will ring with you, and therefore how to present a story to you, such that you will be likely to repeat the sound bites on one side of the issue or the other.
They can do this, with an automated system, for hundreds of millions of people -- as can anyone who pays them enough for the data or analysis. It is not a difference in type from what has gone by the name of PR, spin, or handling; but rather a difference of speed, pervasiveness, precision targeting, and potency. It puts more power to distort human perception of reality in the hands of fewer people than ever before -- by orders of magnitude.
The data, once gathered, will remain, and will be packaged and sold, and cracked and siezed, until long after you are dead -- barring some very serious and extremely disruptive counteractivity. It is getting worse every day, and the cost of correcting it is growing exponentially.
Most people don't know it is happening, and most of those who do don't seem to grasp the consequences.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
How does gay male yoga differ from normal yoga?
In male yoga we "center our beings" by being in the back row and not doing a whole lot of actual yoga.
Your analysis of their analysis proves that you can't analyze analyses. Being right 88% of the time means being wrong 12% of the time. It's not special that they aren't right for you.
Also, being "right" 88% of the time is meaningless unless you break out false positives and false negatives. It is estimated that 5-10% of the population is gay. So I could just predict that everyone is straight, and I would be "right" more than 90% of the time.
Why not just never hit a like button? Sure, it's possible for Google to figure things out based on my URLs, but dang at least they have to work for that one.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
The authors of the study all liked LOTR.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
People like to think that they're "undefinable". In fact, all they are are values of a vector random variable. If you know the values of some of the components you can infer the values of others, because they are not all independent. A similar principle (vector quantization) is used in lossy data compression.
Somebody will come in here and say "No, you can't know for certain, that's what makes us human" -- no, that's what makes you a random variable. A vector-valued one, but a random variable nonetheless.
No. Sometimes, they are statistical observation. Sometimes they are just confirmation bias.
Most of the time they're just a small group that distinguish themselves so clearly. For example if you asked me to mime an American, I'd probably go for a gun-toting Texan even though I'm perfectly aware that they're hardly representative of a country of 300 million. But those other people are a lot like other people found other places, so if you're going for the uniquely American they rise to the top of the pile. Same with almost every other stereotype I can think of, they're more like a mascot or caricature than reflecting reality.
At least those based on things like country, now people of the same profession on the other hand can actually be disturbingly like their stereotype. It's something to do with the personality of people attracted to the same line of work and the cultural conformity, like a friend of mine once said after speaking at a conference for county auditors. "I went to the conference thinking it would dispel the stereotypes I had, instead I found they were all true." People have an incredible way of adjusting to what they perceive as normal and that becomes the stereotype.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The more they mine data, the more they are polishing my turds.
You're just an outlier in the data. Easily identified, easily filtered out...
Coming up with a profile that is completely incorrect and undetectably so is far more difficult than just being random and contradictory.
And how many women on these sites are really single?
Meh. I want to know how many of them are really, you know... women.
From TFA:
The Williams Institute found that, overall, an estimated 8.2 percent of the population had engaged in some form same-sex sexual activity. Put another way, 4.7 percent of the population had wandered across the line without coming to think of themselves as either gay or bisexual.
That same study found out that (from the same FA):
just 1.7 percent of Americans between 18 and 44 identify as gay or lesbian, while another 1.8 percent -- predominantly women -- identify as bisexual.
Basically, that "less than 2%" number is the people who think of themselves as being homosexual or bisexual.
8.2% apparently just like having sex with people of the same sex. Clearly, they're not gay.
Cause they don't identify with being gay.
Cause it's all about identifying.
That's why I always identify myself with Superman.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I also regularly search for terms on terms in Qu'ranic Islam (I'm an atheist but find it interesting) and nuclear technology (I'm a physics geek and that's one of my "things".)
I hear the weather in Gitmo is great this time of year.
How many women on these sites are real?
Thankfully it only takes one... I met my wife on a dating site. We just celebrated our second wedding anniversary and are preparing for our daughter's birthday.
Dating sites aren't always as horrid and retched as they seem to be - they're a great way for a shy guy and a shy girl who may otherwise never have crossed paths to get together.
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan
Yep.
Any well designed social psych/sociology research project will have tons of ways to check for validity and consistency of data, and the more clever ones will even have ways of identifying the particular ways people will fuck with data and developing a partial profile there, too.
The vast majority of the data will be a fairly accurate representation - the user base is so large that a few "clever" people trying to piss in the well won't have any effect - they aren't even a blip - while the rest of the userbase doesn't see much point in liking random things or going against the established function of the systems.
As to the study itself - I think it will be interesting to see how the profile for any given demographic shifts over time as various things become more or less mainstream and more or less strongly associated with various demographic buckets.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
If it turns out that, on average, 95% of people who watch Top Gear are heterosexual and 95% of people who watch Glee are homosexual, if I like both it proves absolutely nothing about me.
Except that now we all know you are bisexual.
No left turn unstoned.
Denial?
Support Right To Repair Legislation.