LONDON: Facebook knows you better than your friends, your parents and, sometimes, even your spouse.
To prove this, British scientists have created an online tool that can predict everything from who you’d like to sleep with, to how smart you are – based on nothing but your Facebook ‘likes’.
In the future, the tool could be used by police forces to spot and monitor trouble makers on social media before they commit a crime.
Dubbed ‘Apply Magic Sauce’, the app estimates your gender, intelligence, politics, religion, life satisfaction and sexual preference.
It also guesses your education and relationship status and judges the ‘Big Five’ personality traits of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.
‘Personality tests are artificial but Facebook ‘likes’ are things people have done as part of their real lives,’ Dr David Stillwell, the researcher behind the test at Cambridge University, told DailyMail.com.
He says this makes the tool strangely accurate and, as he put it, ‘possibly a bit creepy’.
‘When you compare the ability of a computer to the ability of a friend, or your parents, or colleagues, the computer can predict personality more accurately,’ he said.
