Facebook already knows a stack about you – your age, sex, where you live, where you are at that very moment, even your political leanings.
And in its latest plan for world domination, apparently Facebook’s tech brains are trying to work out your financial status too – be you rich or broke. And you can bet you’ll soon be targeted ads to suit your socioeconomic position.
According to an article in IFL Science Facebook filed a patent in mid-2016 that would allow it to utilise an algorithm that could predict a user’s financial wealth.
The news only became public a couple of weeks ago due to documents filed with the US Patent And Trademark Office.
It’s not entirely clear how Facebook would collect the information, although some sort of online questionnaire would be the most logical answer.
According to the US Patent And Trademark Office documents, it would work thus: “An online system uses classifiers to predict the socioeconomic group of users of the online system.
“The classifiers use models that are trained using features based on global information about a population of users such as demographic information, device ownership, internet usage, household data, and socioeconomic status.
“The global information can be aggregated from market research questionnaires and provided to the online system,” it read.
Facebook has admitted that it is looking at the technology, however, has said there are, as yet, no plans to implement it. A company spokesman telling US news site The Hill: “We often seek patents for technology we never implement, and patents should not be taken as an indication of future plans.”
