SmartBlog On Social Media » Facebook finds a way to predict your ethnicity

Via Inside Facebook 

A team of researchers from Facebook has come up with a way to predict the ethnicity of Facebook users in the U.S. by using a combination of U.S. Census data and an analysis of users’ first and last names. The team won the award for best paper at a social-media conference organized by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in Washington, D.C.

The Facebook Data team confined its analysis to the country’s four largest ethnic groups: Caucasians, African-Americans, Asian/Pacific Islanders and Hispanics. It used Census records to identify the most likely ethnicity of a user based on his or her last name.

SmartBlog On Social Media » Facebook finds a way to predict your ethnicity