Facebook users’ personality traits can be predicted from public data without consent.

Evidence

In a 2012 paper Kosinski and Stillwell concluded that “user personality can be easily and effectively predicted from public data” and warned that social media users are dangerously unaware of the vulnerabilities that follow their innocent but voluminous personal disclosures. Their discussion specifically cited Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s unilateral upending of established privacy norms in 2010, when he famously announced that Facebook users no longer have an expectation of privacy. Zuckerberg had described the corporation’s decision to unilaterally release users’ personal information, declaring, “We decided that these would be the social norms now, and we just went for it.” — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 854

Categorization

• XREF: Zuckerberg’s unilateral norm-setting connects to the broader surveillance-capitalism argument that corporations seize unilateral power over the behavioral surplus they collect. — connects to: 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; Tenant-screening firms scrape private social media data without contest or appeal. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 541; Facebook likes accurately reveal private attributes including sexual orientation and drug use. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 855 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Facebook likes predict personality and life outcomes as accurately as human judges #corroborates (0.90) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 858
• A single app accessed profiles of tens of millions without consent #exemplifies (0.90) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 872
• Social sharing of behavioral data abolishes individual privacy in favor of group truth #expands (0.78) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1393
• The free-web data mining model depends on users not recognizing they are the product #expands (0.75) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1116