Liking to Reveal Your Privacy?

Everyone who is a regular on Facebook – which is a large percentage of the populace it seems – surely knows what it means to “Like” something. Most understand that to do so is not to necessarily be happy about something, but it means we understand or are in agreement with whatever it happens to be stating. In a recent TechNewsWorld article by Erika Morphy, it has been revealed that through data crunching the things you click “Like” on, many personal aspects of your life and beliefs can be accumulated fairly accurately. 

Things like sexual orientation, political leanings and musical tastes can all be determined just by the types of posts you have clicked on, even if you have never posted direct information about the topics. Morphy’s article pulls the information from an article by Fred Lewsky, discussing the study released from Cambridge that states, “Research shows that intimate personal attributes can be predicted with high levels of accuracy from ‘traces’ left by seemingly innocuous digital behaviour, in this case Facebook Likes. Study raises important questions about personalised marketing and online privacy.”

Of all of the case studies compiled, the results were pretty impressive:

Researchers created statistical models able to predict personal details using Facebook Likes alone. Models proved 88% accurate for determining male sexuality, 95% accurate distinguishing African-American from Caucasian American and 85% accurate differentiating Republican from Democrat. Christians and Muslims were correctly classified in 82% of cases, and good prediction accuracy was achieved for relationship status and substance abuse – between 65 and 73%.

This type of information can be used to target advertising to the user’s tastes more accurately, which will result in more revenue, at least that is the game plan. “When taken as a whole, researchers believe that the varying estimations of personal attributes and personality traits gleaned from Facebook Like analysis alone can form surprisingly accurate personal portraits of potentially millions of users worldwide,” says Lewsky.

Michal Kosinski is the Operations Director at the Psychometric Centre that assisted in the research with Cambridge, and he comments “I am a great fan and active user of new amazing technologies, including Facebook. I appreciate automated book recommendations, or Facebook selecting the most relevant stories for my newsfeed. However, I can imagine situations in which the same data and technology is used to predict political views or sexual orientation, posing threats to freedom or even life.” Even David Stillwell, part of the Cambridge University research team, added: “I have used Facebook since 2005, and I will continue to do so. But I might be more careful to use the privacy settings that Facebook provides.”

Paul Kurnit, the clinical professor of marketing at Pace University told TechWorldNews, "This is a huge issue. In this age of behavioral marketing, too few Facebook -- and other social and digital -- users have any idea how much personal information they give away on a regular basis." Adding to that, the CEO of IDTheftSecurity.com, Robert Siciliano, states, "Liking anything on Facebook should be -- but isn't -- looked at as a well thought-out process. Sometimes a Like on what might seem to be an innocuous rant or funny photo could be interpreted by others as racist, homophobic or abusive to others."

Sadly, what should be just fun socializing is becoming more and more abused and used as an invasion of privacy, and the user has little they can do to stop it – aside from actually stopping the action. As the saying goes, where there is a will, there is a way, and even when it seems something is being abused, where there is a will, there tends to be someone in a technical career willing to accommodate.

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