Could your Facebook status reveal your personality?

Question: How do you determine someone’s “web-personality”? Now you can easily find the answer with FiveLabs, an American website that sifts through your activities on the most famous social networks to determine aspects of your personality. After logging in through our Facebook account, a graph is drawn on the page, detailing features of our main characteristics.

To achieve this, the analysis is based on a study conducted by the University of Pennsylvania which concludes that an individual’s whole personality can be identified by using five main features. These are: the extroversion, openness, neurosis (in which the site also ranks the unpleasant emotions, such as depression or anger …), self-esteem, sympathy and being conscientious (reliability, accuracy …).

The site also allows you to compare your personality to that of your friends (thus measuring your compatibility and the foundations of your friendship) and of interesting personalities and celebrities. We were rather amused to discover that Barack Obama is not neurotic, and that I can easily be friends with Jennifer Lawrence!

A small problem though: this site posses the question of accessibility of the stored information posted daily on Facebook. Fivelabs, for example, can obtain and access without difficulty all posts by our friends to perform its analysis. A little disturbing, right?

Grégoire Provost