

A Like Button Can Be A Very Dangerous Thing - ghostwords
http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/45274645700/a-like-button-can-be-a-very-dangerous-thing

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claudius
[0] is a rather amusing read. Given are personality traits with the groups
correlating the strongest with said traits. Personal favourite:

Liking ‘Walking With Your Friend & Randomly Pushing Them Into
Someone/Something’ correlates with having few friends. Go figure.

[1] is the full article of about four pages.

[0]
[http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2013/03/07/1218772110.DCSu...](http://www.pnas.org/content/suppl/2013/03/07/1218772110.DCSupplemental/st01.pdf)

[1]
[http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/03/06/1218772110.full...](http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/03/06/1218772110.full.pdf)

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guiambros
Great links, thanks for sharing.

The paper [1] is particularly intriguing. I've been wondering if anyone had
done any serious correlation analysis of FB Likes with other personal traits.
This is a good starting point.

There's a sea of personal information available, and most people are willingly
sharing with apps/pages/sites or publicly with the world.

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akozak
"researchers could predict personal information based on non-obvious cues. Not
everyone successfully predicted to be gay, for example, had Liked “Gay
Marriage.”

Supporting gay marriage is an obvious cue of someone being gay?

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Zikes
I guess we'd better be careful about supporting marijuana legalization, too.

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thomasz
The most disturbing takeaway from this article is that it's not necessary to
"like" marijuana legalisation to be identified as a stoner. It can be inferred
from your taste of music, movies, and so forth. More disturbing: Even if you
are careful what you "like", your social network is probably a sufficient
indicator.

This shit scares the fucking hell out of me.

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iamben
I blogged a little about this at the end of February after playing with the
new Graph Search bar. I think when it's finally rolled out a lot of people are
going to be surprised at the searches they're turning up in - it's incredibly
easy to find people (friends, friends of friends, randoms) by their religion,
political leanings, potentially objectionable activities (hunting, fighting,
etc) etc.

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aeturnum
If I understand it correctly, Graph Search uses only directly disclosed data.
If you're searching for, say, Christians you'll only get people who list
"Christian" in their profile. Facebook isn't doing statistical analysis to
find people who don't list themselves as Christians, but are "probably"
Christian.

I see that as a lot less troubling, mostly because it's much easier to
understand what you do and don't write in your profile v.s. the unconscious
patterns in your behavior.

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jrabone
I thought I'd seen "Friends of Christians who like...", "Spouses of friends of
Christians who like..." which does a lot of the legwork for you in terms of
inferences.

The problem with Graph Search is, well, it's a graph; I suspect many people
are slightly surprised by graph theoretic results - Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon
et al.

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aeturnum
I think it'll wake a lot of people up to the information they're giving out to
friends, but I think it's a very different thing than what this article
outlines.

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mynewwork
"A number of startups are helping banks decide whether to extend a loan by
mining social media to predict whether a person is creditworthy"

I thought the whole point of going to the "credit score" system was the remove
any risk of bias (or accusations of bias) from lending. Isn't social media
mining just going to bring back the exact same issues?

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testtesttest678
When you are using social network, you should know you don't have privacy
already.

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testtesttest678
Was my comment submitted successfully? I didn't see it.

