We all know that Facebook tracks each user’s daily activity, but did you know it is possible to predict who you will add as friends in the future?
Jure Leskovec, a researcher from Stanford University, has discovered a way to predict who you will most likely be friends with by tracking your social activity such as tweets, retweets, friends and likes. The accuracy is 50% at the moment but it is expected to go higher in future.
Facebook already predicts who you may be closer with inside of your social circle in the “friends” section on your profile. They take into consideration whose page you have viewed most often, who has viewed your page most often, and who has viewed your page most recently. This way they are able to show what they consider the most relevant friends for each user. Creeped out yet?
Information like this is being stored and analyzed to study how online communities grow over time. Communities can then be monitored and compared to the ideal online network to discover if the network is healthy or over-saturated.
By following whose pictures you view, whose wall you comment on, and how often you do so, Facebook is able to find out almost anything they want to know about you and your personal networks. Many people will try to change their security settings in order to avoid this, but the truth is in order to lay low its best not to use Facebook at all.
Although the idea of someone tracking your every move on social networks can leave you feeling a little uneasy, no one has ever died from letting information about their social network land in the hands of Mark Zuckerberg. At the end of the day you can make the decision on whether Facebook is right for you.
