Facebook likes accurately reveal private attributes including sexual orientation and drug use.

Evidence

In 2013 another provocative study by Kosinski, Stillwell, and Microsoft’s Thore Graepel revealed that Facebook “likes” could “automatically and accurately estimate a wide range of personal attributes that people would typically assume to be private,” including sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age, and gender. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 855

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what exactly did the 2013 ‘likes’ study measure for accuracy, and how did accuracy vary across attributes (e.g., sexual orientation was often cited as highly accurate)?
• ADDENDUM: Directly relevant as a concrete data point for the surveillance-capitalism definition — personality prediction from social data is the empirical engine behind behavioral surplus.
• XREF: connects to: Facebook likes predict personality and life outcomes as accurately as human judges — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 858; Facebook users’ personality traits can be predicted from public data without consent. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 854; Facebook’s Open Graph program captured user data across third-party platforms — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 114

Broader Connections

• Facebook likes predict personality and life outcomes as accurately as human judges #expands (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 858
• Facebook users’ personality traits can be predicted from public data without consent. #expands (0.82) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 854
• Facebook’s Open Graph program captured user data across third-party platforms #expands (0.75) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 114