According to science fiction, future machines will be able to do just about anything except love and, ironically, the robot dance. No advanced machine in pop culture seems capable of grasping the majestic complexity of the human mind ... which is probably very embarrassing for them because real, modern-day computers can do exactly that. Not only do we already have computer programs that can peer into your very soul, a lot of them are being used on you right now .

5 An Algorithm Can Find Your Physical Location From Your Friends' Tweets

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Isn't it nice taking a break and just falling off the grid? It sure was. Notice the past tense. Now you don't have to so much as touch the Internet, and your location can still be tracked, thanks to a program that can determine where you are at any given moment based on your friends' tweets.

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In hindsight, Rhonda should have blocked @RhondasStalker.

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A group at the University of Rochester built an algorithm that uses tweets to automatically identify the social relationships of active Twitter users based on their tweets' content and geo-tagged location. After identifying who your friends are, the algorithm then uses the data from their online activity to pinpoint your exact location, even if you yourself are not tweeting anything about the status of your current burritos, or glib observations about TV shows.

The idea behind Flap ("Friendship + Location Analysis and Prediction") is quite simple. Let's say that the algorithm detected that Mark, Joe, and Bob are best friends. If Mark tweets "partying with my two best buds," and Joe tweets "just found a rat in my pancake LOL!" the system can venture a guess that Bob, who hasn't tweeted anything, is probably getting regrettable drunk food with Mark and Joe at Denny's at 2 in the morning.

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Later, it traces Bob next to a pile of dumpster-side cholestervom.

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The actual algorithm is naturally much more complex and has been designed for noble goals, like predicting the spread of pandemics and such. And certainly no technology developed for noble ends has ever been misused -- just ask Nobel himself.