So I just read a pro tip about not taking online personality quizzes because they will be sold to people who might not have your best interest at heart such as marketing agencies (makes sense) and hackers. I just can’t imagine anything a hacker really could do with that. Or would want to?
In: Technology
It’s not really hackers, it’s a form of social engineering. Perhaps it could be used to filter out susceptible targets for fraud, or just to be more effective at selling you stuff. It’s one thing for an advertiser to sell you stuff based on your likes/dislikes/recent search history/group memberships… but something else if they can tune the add to your triggers based on your personality profile.
Do you ever get that feeling that your social media service knows just what to sell you and when? As if it’s listening to you? That’s psychometrics.
In the UK and USA in 2016 massive micro targeting operations were run to sway voters by using psychometric data pulled from online quizzes to target voters in swing seats with adds designed around their triggers based on profiles including psychometrics. Brexit and Trump are extreme examples of what ‘hackers’ can do with personality profiles, Cambridge Analytica were the company employed to do this by Vote Leave in the UK.
So for now the horse has bolted, World Events have been steered and Leaders selected through exploitation of massive datasets of personality profiles.
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