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Here’s what Facebook knows about you based on your ‘likes’

From “likes” to pictures, we hand over a lot of personal data to Facebook. But what can the company discern about us based on all of that information?

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Probably more than you’d expect.

Michal Kosinski, an assistant professor in organizational behavior at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, set out to find out what Facebook could determine about an individual's personality and demographic information based only on their “likes.”

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Researchers at the University of Cambridge created a tool that profiles people based on their Facebook likes.
Reuters/Dado Ruvic

So Kosinski created a tool while he was at the University of Cambridge that analyzes your Facebook “likes” to generate a basic profile of you that includes things like your age, gender, personality traits, and political leanings. Most of these results are displayed as percentiles. 

The tool, which is called Apply Special Sauce, “translates individuals’ digital footprints into detailed psychological profiles” and can help you see how others perceive you online, according to its website.

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Apply Special Sauce
A snapshot of my personality based on the Apply Special Sauce tool.
University of Cambridge

I tried out the tool and was pretty impressed by its accuracy. While it's not 100 percent accurate, I found it does give a pretty good glimpse of how you can be profiled based on something as simple as your “likes.”

You can try out the tool for yourself on the University of Cambridge website.

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