Does Privacy Exist in Online Spaces
BCM240 Digital Project by Alannah Curry
(Alex, 2013)
What does Facebook do with your data?
Using Facebook as a study, we can see the extent to which our data can be used to predict certain behaviours and characteristics about us.
The graph to the right was produced after a study conducted by The Psychometrics Centre at the University of Cambridge (Kosinskia, Stillwella & Graepel 2013, 1). This study was based on the ‘dataset of over 58,000 volunteers who provided their Facebook Likes, detailed demographic profiles, and the results of several psychometric tests.’ (Kosinskia, Stillwella & Graepel 2013, 1).
From this data, a ‘range of highly sensitive personal attributes including: sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age, and gender’ were predicted with a high degree of accuracy (Kosinskia, Stillwella & Graepel 2013, 1).
‘This study demonstrates the degree to which relatively basic digital records of human behaviour can be used to automatically and accurately estimate a wide range of personal attributes that people would typically assume to be private.’ (Kosinskia, Stillwella & Graepel 2013, 1).
(Kosinskia, Stillwella & Graepel 2013)
However that’s not all Facebook can determine by your online behaviour. In a post by Facebook’s data scientist, Carlos Diuk, it was revealed that Facebook can foresee ‘budding relationships before the relationships start’ (Meyer 2014).
The graph to the left demonstrates the typical number of timeline posts shared between the future couple in the ‘100 days before the relationship starts’ (Duik 2014). This graph tracks the increasing number of posts during the ‘period of courtship’, followed by a decrease in post frequency after the relationship becomes official (Duik 2014).
(Duik 2014)
The characteristic traits and behaviour predictions discussed above are made possible because of the details that Facebook collects, uses and shares, all of which are discretely hinted to in their data policy. While the Facebook Data Policy (2015) discusses how individual’s information is used, it frames such uses in a positive language, making it sound favourable for the individual.