Is it possible to predict personal and psychological characteristics from their “likes”?

[Analogous]

wonder if it is possible to do this with our preferences of music, equipment, objectivity and subjectivity while making choices…?
“…
The digital records of online behavior that they were after were people’s Facebook profiles and their “likes.”

On average, Kosinski and Stillwell obtained about 170 likes per individual. With this information in hand, they could now compare how well a model trained purely on Facebook likes could predict people’s personal and psychological characteristics. …

The finding that shocked the research community (and the world) was that by using just Facebook likes, Kosinski and Stillwell were able to predict your gender with 93 percent accuracy, your politics with 85 percent accuracy, your ethnicity with 95 percent accuracy, and even your sexual orientation with 88 percent accuracy. Of course, some of these findings are fairly intuitive.…”

“….What is so concerning about this result is that people cannot reasonably defend themselves against persuasion attacks when they don’t even know that they are being targeted….”

Weapons of Mass Persuasion: Tracing the Story of Psychological Targeting on Social Media - By Sander van der Linden - Behavioral Scientist

A rigorous assessment of whether psychological targeting on social media can influence our behavior has remained elusive. Until recently.

behavioralscientist.org

 

[arj]

It is like the MBTI tests. if you are truthful then it can easily predict ones personality with a few questions.
the foundation is that the sample set you are collecting is relevant and people are truthful. Eg on FB , since i know there is an algorithm, i might prefer to game it to give me content only I like and ignore anything controversial which means to some extent they are making a decision based on limited information
But again, google perhaps know more about us than we ourselves do . I remember one section in Homo Deux by Harari where the postulation is that the google/FBs of the world will be trusted far more than oneself to get an impartial decision !

 

[Analogous]

If usage of platform or Appa we use are“free” for us, then we and our user data are theirs to use and sell for whatever purposes they wish.
we are the commodity. A comforting mid week pick me up thought.
It starts getting really warm when companies buy this big data and weaponise it for sale to politicians

So, here we are. We can’t stay off line whether it’s buying stuff, socialising, accessing information we “like” and even physical health parameters through werables, all the while accumulating a increasing hoard of data which will be there forever, with us having no control over this.

We are not talking of Malware and spyware here. Wonder where it’s all headed?

Then there are recent tech like ChatGPT. Fascinating possibilities and utility, but also most likely to be used for unscrupulous purposes.
laws and deterrence to cybercrimes and unethical practices are so far behind the speed of technology that it’s inconceivable how they will catch up!

How Does ChatGPT Really Work? (Published 2023)

Learning how a “large language model” operates.

www.nytimes.com