Have you ever thought about what your Facebook profile really says about you? If you go beyond posting selfies and status updates, the data generated by your time spent online is recorded somewhere, and people are looking at it.
Two second-year MFA students at Parsons in the Design and Technology program, Hang Do Thi Duc and Regina Flores Mir, have created Data Selfie to help Facebook users learn more about their activity on the social network.
Data selfie searches through users’ social media history to get information about their likes, dislikes, political leanings, sexual orientation, etc. The program will then go on to create a data profile that mimics what advertisers see.
Hang Do Thi Duc says she started developing the idea for tracking her browsing habits to see how her online activity in both her home country and New York City, where she now lives, affected her data profile.
The program is able to predict not only users likes and dislikes, but their personality traits and beliefs. The team is developing the program using a machine-learning system from IBM Watson.
Data Selfie will soon be available as an iPhone app, and also as a Chrome plugin in about three months, and the demo video was recently released.
The team is targeting parents who want to teach their kids how to protect themselves when using social media. Learning a little bit about how data is used and stored on social media can go a long way towards helping Facebook users better protect their privacy online.
Related Reading: Facebook Launches Security Checkup Tool on Android
[source]Motherboard[/source]
