‘Scientists’ at Facebook have figured out how to identify your romantic partner or best friend from amongst your Facebook connections.
Every day now, we’re reminded how big data and your information on the Internet can let people know pretty much anything about you thanks to algorithms that crunch up your language use, buying habits, friend structure and other various bits of information you probably weren’t even aware you were giving away.
Now, with all this info, Facebook’s data-science team can work out who is romantically involved with whom just by examining link structures on the social networking site. It turns out that if one of your Facebook friends has mutual friends that touch disparate areas of your life, and those mutual friends are themselves not extensively connected, it’s a strong clue that that ‘friend’ is either your romantic partner or at least one of your closest personal friends.
The company says this could help them decide which posts to give extra prominence in news feeds.
"If we can do a better job of identifying all the most important people in your life, there is a lot of opportunity to make Facebook better," says Lars Backstrom, a data scientist at Facebook.
It almost definitely also be of value to Facebook’s advertisers.
The team’s findings add to the pile of other evidence of data-mining possibilities on Facebook. A study this year by University of Cambridge researchers, using data from 58,000 volunteer U.S. Facebook users, found it could predict traits like race, sexuality, substance abuse, and parental separate, using Facebook "likes."
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Others are teasing out demographic cues such as gender and age from the kind of language you use!
