Creepy personality test

[Bob Of Burleson]

Creepy Facebook personality test
could be dream for advertisers,
nightmare for privacy

By Gail Sullivan
The Washington Post

Screengrab showing results of Five Labs personality test. (Courtesy of Five Labs)

A new online tool purports to tell you how much you have in common with Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, LeBron James and any of your Facebook friends. It also has scary implications for the future of online advertising.

A startup called Five Labs created the online tool using five dimensions many psychologists use to describe human personality: openness, extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, agreeableness. (You can check out the tool HERE and use it to scan your own profile).

But instead of asking you to fill out a questionnaire, the tool scans your Facebook wall posts, photo captions and comments for words that predict the “Big Five” personality traits. With the click of a button, you can scan your friends’ pages too.

. . .

Pretty cool. But also pretty scary. Nikita Bier, the founder of Five Labs, said the biggest response from volunteers was “this is kind of creepy.” Are Internet companies doing this sort of analysis on us? volunteers wanted to know.

For better or for worse, the app shows people what companies can do with their online data. “It creates balance in what was previously asymmetrical,” Bier told The Washington Post. “Consumers didn’t know exactly what companies were doing with that data and didn’t understand the capacity.”

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