Data management; when it gets creepy

Source: Ben Goldacre, The Guardian.com

An interesting side-effect of public data being indexed and searchable is that you only have to be sloppy once, for your privacy to be compromised. The computer program Creepy makes good fodder for panic. Put in someone’s username from Twitter, or Flickr, and Creepy will churn through every photo hosting service it knows, trying to find every picture they’ve ever posted. Cameras – especially phone cameras – often store the location where the picture was taken in the picture data. Creepy grabs all this geo-location data and puts pins on a map for you. Most of the time, you probably remember to get the privacy settings right. But if you get it wrong just once – maybe the first time you used a new app, maybe before your friend showed you how to change the settings – Creepy will find it, and your home is marked on a map. All because you tweeted a photo of something funny your cat did, in your kitchen.

The Samaritans app, to be fair, was crude, as many of these sites currently are: analyzewords.com, for example, claims to spot personality characteristics by analysing your tweets, but the results are unimpressive. This may not last. Many people are guarded about their sexuality: but a paper from 2013 [pdf donwload] looked at the Facebook likes of 58,000 volunteers and found that, after generating algorithms by looking at the patterns in this dataset, they were able to correctly discriminate between homosexual and heterosexual men 88% of the time. Liking “Colbert” and “Science” were, incidentally, among the best predictors of high IQ.