What’s your ethnic affinity? Apparently Facebook thinks its algorithm can guess your race based upon the nature of your posts.
This application is an interesting, and dangerous, development although it shouldn’t be expected that it’s any more accurate than the plethora of ‘guess your age/nationality/star sign’ sites that trawl through Facebook pages.
Guessing your race is something clumsy and obvious but its clear that services like Google, LinkedIn and Facebook have a mass of data on each of their millions of users that enables them to crunch some big numbers and come up with all manner of conclusions.
Some of these will be useful to governments, marketers and businesses and in some cases it may lead to unforeseen consequences.
The truth may lie in the data but if we don’t understand the questions we’re asking, we risk creating a whole new range of problems.