We’re not liking the sound of this.
Facebook knows a lot of details about us. Think about it – they know who our friends are, where we are in the world at any given time, our political stance, our family members and much, much more.
However, the latest report show that the social media site will soon be able to know how much money we earn, and we’re not liking the sound of it.
According to IFL Science Facebook filed a patent in July 2016 that would allow them to use an algorithm that could predict a user’s financial wealth.
This information was only made public this month due to a document published by the US Patent & Trademark Office.
According to the US Patent and Trademark Office website, the algorithm will operate as follows:
“An online system uses classifiers to predict the socioeconomic group of users of the online system.
“The classifiers use models that are trained using features based on global information about a population of users such as demographic information, device ownership, internet usage, household data, and socioeconomic status.
“The global information can be aggregated from market research questionnaires and provided to the online system.
“The input information is based on a user profile on the online system associated with the user as well as actions performed by the user on the online system.
“Thus, the online system can predict the user’s socioeconomic group without using the user’s income information.
“The online system can generate content for presentation to the user based on the predicted socioeconomic group.”
Basically, it just means that more advertisements will be shown on our news feeds based on how much we can afford to spend on such.
We’re not liking it.
