You know Facebook knows a lot about you. Zuckerberg’s team uses your data to give you the most possible engaging news feed and tailored ads.
So, what do these guys exactly know about you? No one really knows. But with a Chrome extension, you can at least have “a sense of what Facebook could know about your personality.”
This extension is called Data Selfie. It’s “ a browser extension that tracks you while you are on Facebook to show you your own data traces and reveal how machine learning algorithms use your data to gain insights about your personality,” as they put it on their homepage.
I’ve been trying Data Selfie for more than 37 days now. Why waiting so long? Well, it’s true that the longer the time, the better this kind of algorithms know you. So, here I share and explain my Data Selfie dashboard.
1-What you did and when
On this timeline, you’ll find all of your activity on Facebook recorded, including posts you viewed, posts you liked, links clicked and anything you typed (including private messages), during the last 7 days.
2- What you liked most
Here you’ll find a rank of top friends and pages you spent time reviewing their posts in addition to the top friends and pages you liked their posts.
3- Your concepts, keywords, related entities and personality traits
Here are concepts, keywords, entities and personality traits depending on the content you viewed. Here, the first three parts are not provided for me, because my native language is Arabic. Unfortunately, Arabic is not supported by IBM’s AlchemyLanguage service that is used by Data Selfie to generate these three analyses. It only supports English, German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swedish.
There is no problem with personality traits as it is done using IBM’s Personality Insights. However, this one only supports English, Spanish, Japanese and Arabic.
Here, on this main 5 personality traits scale, you’ll find 2 marks. The yellow one remarks what content you typed suggests, and the green one remarks what content you viewed suggests.
4-Religious and political orientations, health and shopping preferences and more!
The last and furthest group of insights record how Facebook sees your religious and political orientations, health and shopping preferences and other predictions. This is all done using Machine Learning API from the University of Cambridge and algorithm from IBM.
Yet, this is not all what Facebook knows!
As it is mentioned above, this is supposed to give you “a sense of what Facebook could know about your personality.” In Internet Policy Review journal’s take on Data Selfie, authors explain that the extension shows just the tip of the iceberg. After all, It starts recording your data just after you download it, ignoring your previous history. What is more important, it does not track your activity on your #1 communication platform; mobile. It is believed also that Facebook has the ability to generate further and deeper analyses. In addition, this extension uses similar algorithms to generate these analyses, but not Facebook’s ones. So, we still do not really know what Facebook knows about us.
But, it is worth to try it. You can download it by clicking here. It is downloaded by more than 91 k users already. And don’t worry, hopefully, your data is stored nowhere but on your computer, or as they put it:
“ We do not store your data. We pass only the necessary data through our servers to the APIs — without your personal information such as name, gender, etc. While we trust these two third-parties, they might store anonymized data or use the results to improve their services.”
Plus, if you’re a coder or a geek, you can see the extension’s code here. It’s open source.
Have more questions? See FAQs and terms of use page. If you still have questions that are not answered or explained enough, do not hesitate to contact us.
So, have fun trying to discover your Facebook self!
