Psychographic software can predict way more from your photos and it is used right now an facebook.
'I was shocked it was so easy': meet the professor who says facial recognition can tell if you're gay
As well as sexuality, he believes this technology could be used to detect emotions, IQ and even a predisposition to commit certain crimes. Kosinski has also used algorithms to distinguish between the faces of Republicans and Democrats, in an unpublished experiment he says was successful – although he admits the results can change “depending on whether I include beards or not”.
His findings are consistent with the prenatal hormone theory of sexual orientation, he says, which argues that the levels of androgens foetuses are exposed to in the womb help determine whether people are straight or gay. The same androgens, Kosinski argues, could also result in “gender-atypical facial morphology”. “Thus,” he writes in his paper, “gay men are predicted to have smaller jaws and chins, slimmer eyebrows, longer noses and larger foreheads... The opposite should be true for lesbians.”
Kosinski has a different take. “The fact that the results were completely invalid and unfounded, doesn’t mean that what they propose is also wrong,” he says. “I can’t see why you would not be able to predict the propensity to commit a crime from someone’s face. We know, for instance, that testosterone levels are linked to the propensity to commit crime, and they’re also linked with facial features – and this is just one link. There are thousands or millions of others that we are unaware of, that computers could very easily detect.”
Cambridge Analytica always denied using Facebook-based psychographic targeting during the Trump campaign, but the scandal over its data harvesting forced the company to close.
Last edited by numberwang - on 10 July 2018
