This new research may have you watching what you “like” online. A study from the University of Cambridge in England says that Facebook likes can reveal a lot about your personal information.
The Cambridge study claimed to have had success in gleaning “highly sensitive personal attributes” such as sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age, and gender just from what people liked online, according to the research paper.
The analysis surveyed over 58,000 U.S. Facebook users. The users’ likes were figured against their “Facebook prole information psychometric test scores, and survey information,” said the study.
“It’s very easy to click the ‘like’ button, it’s seductive,” David Stillwell, one of the study authors, told AFP. “But you don’t realize that years later all those likes are building up against you.” Stillwell is a psychometrics researcher who worked on the project with colleagues from Cambridge University and Microsoft Research. The work has been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Read also:
Gay? Conservative? High IQ? Your Facebook 'likes' can reveal traits (NBCNews.com (blog))
Facebook 'likes' reveal religious, political, even sexual orientation (SmartPlanet.com (blog))
Armed With Facebook 'Likes' Alone, Researchers Can Tell Your Race, Gender … (The Atlantic)
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