Liking curly fries is a smart thing to do.

So smart that a computer crunching of millions of Facebook “likes,” independent of the information in your profile, can figure out all kinds of personal and often private details of your life, including your IQ.

The study by Michal Kosinki and David Stillwell of the Psychometrics Centre at the University of Cambridge could accurately predict, with varying degrees of success, whether someone used drugs, smoked, had divorced parents and leaned liberal or conservative.

“The best predictors of high intelligence include ‘thunderstorms,’ ‘The Colbert Report,’ ‘science’ and ‘curly fries,’” the study said.

“To be honest, we were mind blown when we saw the results for the first time,” Kosinski told the Star.

“We could predict so many things with so much accuracy. To be able to predict someone’s IQ or personality or whether their parents were divorced was very surprising, even to me, and I predict personality traits all the time.”

The study took the Facebook “likes,” which stay embedded in a social network page, of 60,000 volunteers in the United States. It looked at “photos, friends’ status updates, pages of products, sports, musicians, books, restaurants or popular Websites.”

“Likes represent a very generic class of digital records, similar to Web search queries, Web browsing histories and credit card purchases,” the study said.

Isn’t this dangerous?

“This is one of the main points of the paper,” Kosinski said.

“This is an amazing thing. What used to be expensive and labour intensive to find out can now be done very quickly and potentially more accurately simply by asking someone to access his Facebook profile.

“Our results suggest these results can be done without your consent behind the scenes.

“I would love policy-makers or people to develop this technology so I don’t have to be afraid to use it. Even I can see many ways in which Facebook could preserve its current service and not store data.”

The researchers found the secrets of more selective Facebook users were actually easier to crack open than the people “who spend half their life online.”

The volunteers had from one to 700 likes each, with the average at 170. Highly active Facebook users had a higher level of online noise that could obscure an accurate reading on their private lives, Kosinski said.

Even more troubling, he said, was the computer program’s ability to predict the sexual orientation of someone who hadn’t declared one.

“In Canada, it’s not a big issue. In Iran, people might have an issue with it.”

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To quantify what a “like” might mean, the object had to have at least 20 “likes,” Kosinski said. That meant eliminating 11 million unique “likes” among the volunteers.

The team was able to predict with 95 per cent certainty what race a person was, 93 per cent for gender, 88 per cent for sexual orientation, 82 per cent for religion, 73 per cent for smokers and 60 per cent for divorced parents.

“Individuals with parents who separated have a higher probability of liking statements preoccupied with relationships, such as ‘if I’m with you then I’m with you I don’t want anybody else,’” the study said.

The study was less accurate on personality, which Kosinski said reflects the more arbitrary and changing nature of mood. Their accuracy on intelligence was highest of the psychological traits, at 78 per cent.

Next step, he said, is to figure out what all this means.

“There is no obvious correlation between curly fries and intelligence,” the study said.

What intrigues Kosinski even further is “why certain likes go together. If someone likes Lady Gaga and something else, what does it mean? Is it culture? Is it the way their parents reared them?”

The social scientist in Kosinki imagines a day when a person’s smartphone will be able to predict what they want far more accurately than a spouse, something he finds exciting “but also creepy.”

He’s cautious about the implications of their results, published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“I love Facebook myself and I use it a lot. Facebook is not a bad guy. They do the same thing that everyone else does.

“But Facebook should be honest and discuss this with policy-makers. This is the evolution of technology.”

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