How Facebook 'likes' can reveal clues to your sexuality, political beliefs and religion

Facebook users could unwittingly reveal intimate details about their personal lives by declaring seemingly unrelated information, researchers have warned.
Sexuality, drug use, political views and religious beliefs are all areas that can be accurately predicted by complete strangers monitoring online ‘inferences’, they said.
The threat to privacy has been created by the social network’s ‘likes’ - the hugely popular system used to show approval of a range of subjects ranging from pop stars to chocolate bars, films, pastimes and interests.

Giving too much away: University of Cambridge researchers found they could predict the sexuality and race of Facebook users with high levels of accuracy by looking at what they 'liked' (picture posed by model)

Although seemingly innocuous, the information can be pieced together like a jigsaw to build up profiles.
Declaring support for human rights, Wicked the Musical, Nike Basketball and Bruce Lee can be linked to provide a strong indicator of male homosexuality, for example.
Drug use is suggested by ‘liking’ Big Mommas movies, milkshakes and swimming, while high IQs are indicated by showing a taste for curly fries, Godfather movies and Morgan Freeman’s voice.

 

Researchers predicted male sexuality with 88 per cent accuracy and correctly predicted race 95 per cent of the time. They also had an 85 per cent success rate with political leanings and 82 per cent with religion.
Campaigning organisation Privacy International said the technology threatened all aspects of people’s lives.
Executive director Dr Gus Hosein said: ‘It’s a nightmare scenario that Facebook are entirely responsible for setting up.
‘This information can be used to pre-categorise people. Banks could use it to decide who gets a loan.

Privacy issue: Facebook refused to comment on claims that users' privacy is not being protected

‘It also creates the perfect surveillance state for governments, who will know what people are reading and their exact political persuasion. It is more invasive than CCTV.’
The study - Private Traits and Attributes Are Predictable from Digital Records of Human Behaviour - was carried out by the University of Cambridge’s Psychometrics Centre and based on the Facebook profiles of 58,000 people in the US.
Their ‘likes’ were fed into a computer algorithm which was used to predict a range of personality traits.
Accuracy was checked by comparing results with personal information provided by the volunteers, who were mostly aged between 16 and 30.
Few had clicked on ‘likes’ which explicitly revealed personal information about themselves. For example, just five per cent of homosexuals had clicked on links such as ‘gay marriage’.
Psychometrics Centre operations director Michal Kosinski said: ‘We believe that our results, while based on Facebook likes, apply to a wider range of online behaviours.
‘Similar predications would be made from all manner of digital data, with this kind of secondary ‘inference’ made with remarkable accuracy - statistically predicting sensitive information people might not want revealed.
‘Given the variety of digital traces people leave behind, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for individuals to control.’ The findings will be of interest to the burgeoning online direct personalised marketing industry, which already uses ‘cookies’ to send tailored adverts to people surfing the net.
But Mr Kosinski added: ‘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.’ Fears about threats to the privacy of Facebook users have increased since it was floated on Wall Street in a $100 billion share issue last year.
Analysts warned it would need to find ways of generating more income from its 901 million monthly users, including 30 million in Britain.
In December the company announced users of the Instagram photo-sharing website it owns no longer had the rights to their pictures, meaning images of people as young as 13 could be sold to advertisers.
Facebook users can set privacy settings to protect their personal information - although many fail to do so.
The company declined to comment.