What your Facebook 'likes' really say about you

We are already aware that our every move online is tracked, aggregated and analysed. But you couldn't have known how much Facebook can learn about you from the smallest of social interactions – a "like".

Researchers from the University of Cambridge designed a simple machine-learning system to predict Facebook users' personal information and traits based solely on which pages they had liked.
"We were completely surprised by the accuracy of the predictions," says Michal Kosinski, lead author on the paper in PNAS (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1218772110).

Kosinski and his colleagues built the system by scanning likes for a sample of 58,000 volunteers, and matching them up with other profile details such as age, gender and relationship status. He also matched up those likes with the results of personality and intelligence tests the volunteers had taken. The team then used their model to make predictions about other volunteers, based solely on their likes

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