You're an open Facebook

As if the Internet didn't know enough about you. Yeah, our browsing habits are tracked by service providers and governments, then packaged and sold to corporations, but hey, that's old news.

The new news is coming from social media darling Facebook, and the news is that Facebook knows more about you than simply what you post.

Right now, Facebook's privacy settings allow for users to hide their posts and photos from the would-be stalking public (you know who you are, everyone), but that leaves several profile items open. Stuff like name, profile pic, and, of course, a user's likes. Sure, all this stuff seems rather innocuous but a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science begs to differ.

The study says that what a user likes may say more about them than what they actually write or post.

That's right, liking Celine Dion, The Avengers, and long walks on the beach tell people things you don't want them to know about you, or maybe even things you didn't know about yourself.

The study found things like gender, race, sexuality, religious disposition, all easy to determine, predicting accurately for over 85 per cent of cases. Other traits like political affiliation, and an approximation of age could be determined over 75 per cent of the time based only on what a user liked.

Yeah, how hard is it to figure out if someone is male or female? Someone whose likes include video games, baseball and lack of hygiene (is there a Facebook page for that?) is most likely going to be an adolescent male - or me, though in my case, a lack of hygiene is less genuine interest and more habit.

But what can be predicted by Facebook likes gets even freakier. Using likes, the study was able to predict if a user smokes, how open a user's personality is, their IQ, and if their parents had split up by the time they were 21.

Yeah, impressed much?

Turns out some things are flags for certain traits. Liking Britney Spears and Desperate Housewives was more likely to be associated with being gay than liking things like the No H8 Campaign. Still that isn't a totally mind-blowing conclusion but what about the finding that people with high intelligence like thunderstorms, The Colbert Report, and curly fries?

Yeah, guess who just liked thunderstorms and curly fries on his Facebook profile? I need all the IQ points I can get.

The researchers for the study foresaw the average person - ie, me - being curious about their findings and set up a page, http://www.youarewhatyoulike.com/, where anyone can go and see what their likes say about their own personality. So, of course, I had to try it out.

They promised a one-click personality test and after one click I had my results. From my likes, they were able to determine that I was liberal and artistic, well-organised, shy and reserved, calm and relaxed, and assertive and competitive.

Any problems I had with being categorised as any of these traits - like shy and reserved, which as a TV host I was sceptical - were alleviated by the detailed description. These descriptions always say something vaguely complimentary like "you are Shy and Reserved thus choosing wisely who you interact with rather than socialising and spreading your time among those unworthy of your presence".

In fact, most personality tests describe all the traits as if they're good things, like if you found out you were a serial killer it would read: serial killer, you don't have time for just anyone and those you do have time with you murder. Okay, that didn't read that complimentary but you know what I mean.

After I accepted what the web page had told me as true (who doesn't want to be called artistic?), I sat back and marvelled at how accurate it was. That was until I read the section that listed the likes that were most indicative of my profile. Included there was my like of the James Cameron classic Aliens, one of my favourite DJs RJD2, and then Toronto music artist Esly and Australian writer Matthew Reilly.

Now Esly I liked in order to help a friend who was admin of her page at the time, and Matthew Reilly's writing I liked in a tongue-in-cheek way, the way someone likes the film Anaconda, you know, because it's so bad that it's good. I doubt the study took into account these various other reasons for liking pages.

Then I saw another blurb on my personality profile that said the profile was done using only seven of my 21 likes, which I suppose made sense since most of my likes had been added in the granddaddy days of Facebook when you entered them as text. I wrote stuff like "speaking Spanish badly" which - just like the hygiene example above - isn't as much a like as a situational happenstance.

Only seven out of 21 likes, already a low number as the average Facebook user likes around 60 things, had determined my personality profile.

Maybe it wasn't so accurate, though as people continue to use Facebook earnestly, these types of predictions will only reflect more and more truth and give corporations and governments another way to analyse us. Which really sounds Orwellian, as if things hadn't become Orwellian enough.

Anyway, about my personality profile, I had to question just how artistic I really was. It's sad to be robbed of such a lofty label as artistic but I can take solace in knowing that thunderstorms and curly fries are among my new likes - if I'm not artsy I can at least appear smart.

-http://www.asiaone.com