
Can we guess your age and income, based solely on the apps on your phone? - cpitman
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/03/03/quiz-can-we-guess-your-age-and-income-based-solely-on-the-apps-on-your-phone/
======
meritt
They need a box for "I've never even heard of this app" that would allow them
to better predict I'm an old curmudgeon who is just fine with missing out on
the latest trends.

Instead I'm a twenty-something single woman making more than $52k.

~~~
sdenton4
'Never heard of this app' isn't actually discernable form the list of
installed apps on your phone, which is at the core of the point they're
making.

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pacala
You are a single lady younger than 32 who makes less than $52,000/year. Wrong,
wrong, wrong and, drumroll, wrong.

~~~
patcheudor
I got the same thing. I'm pretty sure they didn't account for security
researchers who like to download free apps to hunt for vulnerabilities. Go
figure.

~~~
didgeoridoo
Same thing here too, for the opposite reason — said no to almost everything. I
have four pages of apps installed, but only three were even on that survey.

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marchelzo
"You are a married lady older than 32 who makes more than $52,000/year You're
either a married, middle-aged lady ... or you use your phone like one."

19 year old male. The only apps that I have on their list are YouTube and
Google Maps.

~~~
Splines
I got the same result but also have Yelp installed. I'm a facebook user but
m.facebook.com is so much better than the native app.

~~~
Normal_gaussian
It is a very sad state of affairs when it is faster to use a website than an
app.

And better privacy.

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detaro
They should add a "were we right?" box at the bottom, I bet the results would
be pretty bad. (For me, not a single thing they assume is right)

~~~
mirkules
They could train the algorithm that way too.

~~~
my5thaccount
That's how Hunch worked and it was pretty good.

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spdustin
>You are a single

Sorry

> guy

Ding!

> younger than 32

No

>who makes more than $52,000/year

One out of two is ... Better than zero! I went back to the drawing board with
a similar prediction system after a series of spectacular failures. I expect
it's a function of how the model was trained and tested; it seems that the
weights given to any specific app may be over fit. But I'm not a mathematician
or statistician or anything beyond a voracious learner with an interest in
this kind of thing. It's piqued my curiosity, and I'm enjoying the responses
you guys are adding here. Actually, it's already made me think about how my
model for my pet project may be over fitting...

(Edited to clarify "single guy" into two features)

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my5thaccount
The only two apps I had in the list were Youtube and Google Maps, both are
installed at the factory and it guessed: You are a married guy older than 32
who makes more than $52,000/year

~~~
santaclaus
Exact same result. I have five screens of apps on my phone yet those two and
Uber are the only apps I have from the quiz.

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pfisch
So basically the answer is no, they can't really tell.

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Archio
For what it's worth, I got nailed for a single guy in his twenties over
$52k/year.

~~~
bt3
Same result, except apparently I'm a single female. Must be because I don't
play Clash of Clans.

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nextstep
Well, looks like we're all single ladies under the age of 32 who make 52k/year

~~~
deadcast
haha yep :~). I'm baffled why it thought I was single because I use
soundcloud. I know people who are married/dating who use that app. Why would
that be an indicator of relationship status?

------
jamiepenney
Got me 100% right, which is weird because I figured the lack of apps on my
phone would be a problem (I have a windows phone so there's a lot missing).
Sounds like it wasn't too accurate for the rest of you though.

~~~
gregmac
If you roll the dice enough times, you'll eventually get snake eyes.

~~~
rupert_murdaaa
Well right, especially since it looks like there's, what, 2^4 possibilities
here? 1 person in this thread getting a correct guess seems about right.

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codyb
Pretty neat. It's always fun to look at data and find interesting
correlations. It nailed it's estimate of me and I felt like I was just
clicking no for almost everything.

~~~
c0n5pir4cy
Same here, some of the apps (like Pandora) don't even work in my country.

------
Keats
"You are a married guy older than 32 who makes more than $52,000/year"

Not really no, granted I ticked no to all the boxes apart from youtube/maps
that comes with android

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konfou
Apparently not using proprietary bloatware makes me a married lady older than
32 that makes >52k$. Well done, Washington Post. 0/4.

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11thEarlOfMar
"You are a married lady older than 32 who makes more than $52,000/year

You're either a married, middle-aged lady ... or you use your phone like one."

I am a male (strike 1), 50+ (strike 2), Side business takes in more than $52k
(strike 3).

I am married (Zillow for Mrs. Mar) and have 2 teen aged daughters (Instagram
to follow them).

I'll give machine learning another decade /s.

~~~
jimrandomh
I see no evidence that they used machine learning. If they had, this thread
might be less full of people saying it did worse than random.

~~~
spdustin
From the paper linked in TFA, scikit-learn's logistic regression model (a
poorly named one, since it's used for classification rather than regression)
is used as the classification model. Like with most machine learning
endeavors, I've found that Johnny Five said it best: "More input!"

------
tumanian
The 61% and 81% accuracy is funny - try to run targeting with that!

The biggest issue with this problem is the data imbalance - how many females
over 50 use apps in general compared to 20year males for example. The training
data is heavily skewed, which leads to the algo learning that everyone is a
single lady under 32 who make 52k/year.

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mcintyre1994
You are a single lady younger than 32 who makes more than $52,000/year

Wrong, wrong, correct!, wrong.

As I suspected, Etsy throws them :) Remove that and they figure out I'm a guy.
I guess they can't tell the difference between a single lady buying herself
things on Etsy and a guy buying his girlfriend something on there, so, no they
can't.

------
Swizec
> if you have Uber, you’re probably single.

Really? That's the indication? Not Tinder? You sure Uber doesn't just mean I
live in a city? Really sure?

The guess was right though. That was kind of nifty, but my answers would
change if the question wasn't do I have the app, but do I use it.

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justifier

        You are a married lady older than 32 
        who makes more than $52,000/year
    

the answer you get if you mark no's for all except the two that came with my
nexus 5: gmaps, yutoube;

where are my favourite apps on the list?: fdroid, kidsdoodle;

------
k-mcgrady
Slightly off with my age but I'm guessing that's because I've recently deleted
all but the essential apps from my phone. I'm sure if I still had Snapchat on
my phone they could've predicted age better for example.

------
venomsnake
> You are a married lady older than 32 who makes more than $52,000/year

Good to know that married ladies have older than 32 have squeakymail and
keychain on their phones. See - pgp is not that hard after all.

------
kozukumi
"You are a married lady older than 32 who makes more than $52,000/year"

When actually I am a co-habiting (good as married tbh) man who is 31 and makes
£120,000/year. So not the greatest guess hah.

~~~
brad0
Hey I'm actually moving from the US to the UK and finding the salaries are
much smaller. Do you work in tech? How did you get that salary?

~~~
kozukumi
I am a C++ programmer (mostly C++ anyway, I also use C and Java albeit not
much which I always say I am a C++ programmer as 90% of what I do is C++).

My salary is quite high for a C++ programmer though but that is because I also
have responsibility for a lot of things that would normally fall into the
technical project or programme manager role. I help with pre-sales, technical
support, architecture design and deployment, operational performance tuning,
etc.

Also I live in West London where salaries are generally a bit higher anyway. I
mostly work from home with a trip to the office in Vauxhall every two weeks
during normal operations. The office is only a 30-40 minute train ride for me
though and when we have a lot going on I will be in the office a couple of
times a week if needed.

My previous experience and specialisation also help me command a higher
salary, I have worked for a few large and high profile companies which does
give me an edge as such.

Where are you moving to in the UK? What will you be doing?

~~~
brad0
Looking right now at work in Edinburgh or Glasgow. Sounds like I'll need to
make a move to London if I really want to earn the big salary.

I work primarily in native mobile. I'm working for Amazon right now and I've
worked for banks, government as well.

~~~
kozukumi
Yeah you won't get such high salaries up in Scotland. Outside of London I know
Bristol pays well also. I think Manchester has some good things going for it
also but never worked there myself.

What exactly do you mean by native mobile? To me that could mean mobile device
firmware or Android NDK type thing.

~~~
brad0
By native mobile I mean writing Java/objc using the mobile SDKs versus
something like Cordova or phonegap. Though I have written C++ for The Sims 3
on iOS.

------
prawn
They had me pegged as a married woman over 32 and earning more than $52k.
Apart from being male, the rest is correct but there weren't many apps I had
and fewer that I used (have Pinterest and Yelp but use neither).

I said yes to ESPN (though I probably have other sports apps instead).
Surprised that didn't outweigh Pinterest as a gender marker?

------
pm24601
Lookout: yes = guy, no = girl Linkedin: yes = more than $52/K year, no = less
than $52K/yr. Snapchat: yes= single,no=married

At least with my base answers.

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rocky1138
It got me correct, but not my income. I use the Yelp website, never their app
:) Goes for a few of them in their list, as well.

------
rmason
This app made my day, it guessed that I was half my age. The income was way
off as well.

But sometimes though I do feel that I am half my age!

------
Joof
I'm a married middle-aged man. Except single and 10 years younger. HN may be
an exception; we are odd.

------
galenko
You are a single guy younger than 32 who makes more than $52,000/year

Ding, except I'm in a long term committed relationship. Interesting that it
thought I was single (I said no to every single dating/chat app on the list),
no facebook, etc, only thing I have is instagram.

------
LeoPanthera
"You are a single guy younger than 32 who makes more than $52,000/year".

Not single. Older than 32. Oh well!

------
jlarocco
Hilariously bad.

"You are a married lady younger than 32 who makes less than $52,000/year"

Wrong on everything.

------
galfarragem
Every fact about you is normally a _tell_ and sometimes just _random_ : the
apps you use, the clothes you dress, the people you know, the travels you
made, etc. A fine-tuned algorithm has an high probability to guess this.

------
ecesena
Reading from the comments - especially the 52k, they should at least add a geo
location.

For m/f the phone name may help.

I understand this is out of scope, but the results seem pretty poor otherwise.

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pm24601
What about the parent who has a zillion apps courtesy of their child? so some
apps are the adult's and others are the kids.

Bet that would muddy any statistical analysis.

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drpgq
I wonder if an easier way would be through accessing your camera roll and
determining age and gender through the whichever face appears the most.

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vq
"You are a married guy older than 32 who makes more than $52,000/year", I am a
guy, so... 1 out of 4 I guess.

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B1FF_PSUVM
Haha, iFunny makes you younger than 32.

(Your only other apps being Google Maps and YouTube makes you a married male
making 52k+)

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andrethegiant
If I'm not mistaken, iOS apps aren't allowed to see what other apps are
installed, is that correct?

~~~
doctorpangloss
It's nuanced, but you can use techniques like app URL scheme querying to
determine what is installed. [1] People will be replying to you with
information from 2011—today, it is generally not possible to query for a large
number of installed apps this way. So generally, the answer is no.

Without going into much detail, the state of the art uses Facebook in a
peculiar way to determine which _relevant_ apps are installed, relevant
meaning high grossing (Clash of Clans, Spotify, Tinder are examples).

[1] [http://useyourloaf.com/blog/querying-url-schemes-with-
canope...](http://useyourloaf.com/blog/querying-url-schemes-with-canopenurl/)

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sonabinu
Nailed me but goofed on gender!

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ape4
Most Washington Post readers are older. But it would be cheating to use that
info.

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serge2k
> You are a single guy younger than 32 who makes more than $52,000/year

Neat.100% right.

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mamon
After this quiz I definitely feel old: never heard of like 28 out of 32 apps

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zippergz
Apparently I'm a single lady under 32 (wrong on both counts).

~~~
lmitchell
Haha I'm married (wrong), over 32 (wrong by about ten years), and make more
than 52,000/year (wrong by more than I'd like to admit as an intern :D)

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mindslight
Odd, no choices for ConnectBot or a full Debian install?

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CiPHPerCoder
I have a stock Cyanogenmod phone with Orbot and Signal. I don't otherwise
install apps (less attack surface), so I hit "No" to most of everything on the
list.

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Splines
Amusingly, Betteridge's law of headlines holds true here as well.

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godzillabrennus
This might as well be a joke quiz you share results of on Facebook it's so
wildly inaccurate.

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sabujp
completely wrong

