Even if you are not in a social network, they still have some information about you.

Scientists have figured out what and how the shadow profili



We all have friends who smugly boasted that does not consist in social networks, and so their private life protected. But a new study shows that they have more reason to worry than they think, says Gizmodo.

A team of researchers from ETH Zurich believes that social networks have information about all they are registered on the site or not. And although researchers did not have access to the information Facebook or Twitter, they studied archival data publicly available site Friendster. They discovered that the data are there, provide some valuable information about people who are not registered on the site, including their orientation, age, relationship status, occupation and political beliefs.



The article Dr. David Garcia working on the project, showed that the algorithms can mine data to predict the orientation of the person with an accuracy of 60%, compared with 5% in the case where the program simply "guesses" it. He believes that this analysis can provide similar results for other categories. This information has become possible to obtain because Garcia calls the "shadow profiles". Using statistical analysis to explore the tastes, opinions and attitudes of people using the service, you can apply the findings to people who do not use the site. And to make them a lot of conclusions.

While according to the site Friendster has more than ten years, similar information is available in all the social networks - the only question is whether it is used or not. In other words, Facebook has the opportunity at hand, and engineers and statisticians who are in a hurry to write code to extract the information almost instantly. Although Facebook claims that in the past there "was no shadow accounts or profiles - hidden or no more - for people who are not registered with the service," this does not mean that he does not analyze the data in order to gain a deeper understanding people.

via factroom.ru

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