We all know that Facebook has a lot of information about us, but what exactly can it learn from all that data?
Aside from the most obvious -- the things you give it, such as gender, date of birth, place of living, education, work, your favorite sports clubs, music and movies -- it can also conclude a lot of things on its own.
Those include your Big Five personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism), intelligence, life satisfaction, sexual preference, political orientation, relationship status and education -- all based solely and exclusively by what you liked on the site.
How do I know all that? Because researchers at the University of Cambridge’s Psychometrics Centre have built a tool that uses your likes, and no other data, to build up a picture of your personality.
The tool, called Apply Magic Sauce, uses your Facebook likes to estimate the things I have listed above.
You can also follow links to take further personality tests on the University of Cambridge website.
This is not Facebook’s tool, but rather a tool of the researchers, but it shows the picture of you that the social network can build just based on your activity. In reality, likes are only a fraction of the information Facebook has on you.
Visit the Apply Special Sauce website here and select "Try it Out".
You’ll be asked to log in via Facebook. The website says it only collects your profile’s LikeIDs, but will not store any of your information once the test is complete.
I have tried it out myself and it’s pretty accurate.
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