While we all know the Internet affords us many opportunities to be anonymous (trolls, anyone?), there's also a ton of data available about you in the digital ether. Any time you sign up for a social network, app or other kind of online service that asks for your demographics, such as age, gender or race, you're giving someone your personal data.
With news of the nude celebrity photo leak that broke recently, the issue of online privacy has once again been pushed into the spotlight. However, all of the big data available out there about digital users isn't usually intended for nefarious purposes.
Sometimes, the personal data is used to target advertisements or certain content to users. Other times, it can provide great insight into how the Internet and technology impact people's lives, such as the tons of analyses the Facebook Data Science team has conducted on what the social network can tell you about your love life. But all of this only skims the surface of the capabilities of big data collected online.
Christian Rudder, the co-founder and president of the online dating site OkCupid, released a new book on Sept. 9 called "Dataclysm." In the book, he shows how the personal data you give out online can be used as a way to study human behavior.
Yes, folks. This is the same OkCupid that admitted it was running experiments on its users back in July. Rudder revealed the experiments in a blog post shortly after Facebook admitted to running psychological experiments on its users. Some of OkCupid's findings were interesting, such as people behave differently when they can't see users' photos and what you write in your profile accounts for only 10 percent of what people think of you.
Apparently, there's more Rudder can cull from our personal lives than just in the love department. "Dataclysm" includes charts, graphs and commentary on how Facebook "Likes" can determine a person's sexual orientation, the rise and fall of a much-hated word on Google and human migration over time.
Many of the findings from "Dataclysm" give us insight into subjects people don't like to talk about. One is that heterosexual men, regardless of age, are most attracted to women in their early 20s, although if you think about it, that's pretty much what you would expect. Google searches for "Is my husband gay?" are most common in the states that have the least tolerance for gay marriage. Rudder also found that the day after President Barack Obama's election and inauguration, Google searches for the "n word" spiked and then dropped off within the month.
In case all of this is making you a bit squeamish, Rudder assures us that all of this data is aggregated and anonymous, so data scientists can't really trace the results back to you personally. "But when you put all this stuff together, you're able to look at people in a way that people have never been able to look at people before," Rudder told NPR. "It's the beginning of, I think, a revolution in how social science and behavioral science are done."
So whether you're prepared for it or not, the age of Internet Enlightenment is officially upon us.
