Facebook knows more about you than the therapist you’ve already paid 10 one-to-one sessions to. It knows what you like to eat, to drink, what interests you have, what kind of humor you prefer, and the TV shows you’ve been binge-watching. And all that simply by analyzing the data you enter yourself into the app every day. If you want to know what Facebook or any other social media platform really knows about you, you can create your psychological profile based on the data gathered. All you need is a magic sauce, a tool developed by Cambridge University. If you want to learn how to create your psychological profile based only on personal data gathered by Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, stay tuned.
Creating Your Uncannily Accurate Psychological Profile
Every like, comment, message, post, share, like, or video you watch on the platform is quantified in numbers, which add up in one place—your virtual Facebook profile. Based on this, Facebook delivers ads targeted to your preferences. It’s actually quite hard to get it wrong, and even if you say you’re not interested in those cast iron pans you saw on the platform yesterday, you’ll still see ads until you buy them. One could say that Facebook knows what you really want better than you do.
The Magic Sauce algorithm from the Cambridge Psychometrics Center claims to create psycho-demographic profiles from Facebook behavior and, although it doesn’t tell you much at first glance, if you look closely you’ll discover some interesting things.
What Is “Apply Magic Sauce” and Why Was It Built?
First, we need to establish what Apply Magic Sauce is and what it isn’t. For maximum accuracy, it’s best to refer to the original description: “Apply Magic Sauce is a non-profit academic research project coordinated by the University of Cambridge Psychometrics Centre. The demos and platforms available are a modest attempt to reverse the trend in Big Data and empower citizens to not only retain control of their data but also derive meaningful insight from it. We build analytics tools that you can use on your own data to see how others see you, and we collect anonymous opt-in datasets to advance scientific enquiry into online behavior, digital footprint analysis and artificial intelligence. We believe in the power of academia for real-world impact and care not about identifying you personally, but providing you with tools to individualize your own experience. We encourage companies and academics to adhere to the following ethical principles, in addition to the applicable legal restrictions. These are based on our experience, and supported by a Psychometrics Centre survey of over 34,000 participants worldwide regarding how they would like their Big Data to be used”.
The platform is extremely easy to use, and it shows you how to download your personal data from Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Remember that, in some cases, depending on the account, it could take up to 24 hours for your data to be ready.
How Does Magic Sauce Work?
Using data from millions of research participants, comprising both social media profiles and matching scores on psychometric tests, the creators of Apply Magic Sauce developed a model that they claim to accurately predict personal attributes, including sexual orientation, ethnicity, and levels of intelligence and happiness.
The free demo predicts your psycho-demographic profile from digital footprints of your behavior. It reveals how you might be perceived by others online and provides academically robust insights on your personality, intelligence, leadership, life satisfaction, and more.
Apply Magic Sauce places you into a category, based on five big personality traits. Some right, others not quite. They say they make “predictions”.
What Happens with Data Collected by Apply Magic Sauce?
After feeding the algorithm all your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn data, it’s normal to ask what happens with all that information. Well, they claim that the use of this demo is completely anonymous, and your results will not be stored.
The idea that every citizen has a right to understand their data has been gaining more and more ground. Fortunately, you can now download your social media data and analyze it directly using a comprehensive tool. And it’s way cheaper than your therapist.
