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Facial recognition technology can expose political orientation from naturalistic facial images

Ubiquitous facial recognition technology can expose individuals’ political orientation, as faces of liberals and conservatives consistently differ. A facial recognition algorithm was applied to naturalistic images of 1,085,795 individuals to predict their political orientation by comparing their sim...

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Autor principal: Kosinski, Michal
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group UK 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7801376/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33431957
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-79310-1
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author Kosinski, Michal
author_facet Kosinski, Michal
author_sort Kosinski, Michal
collection PubMed
description Ubiquitous facial recognition technology can expose individuals’ political orientation, as faces of liberals and conservatives consistently differ. A facial recognition algorithm was applied to naturalistic images of 1,085,795 individuals to predict their political orientation by comparing their similarity to faces of liberal and conservative others. Political orientation was correctly classified in 72% of liberal–conservative face pairs, remarkably better than chance (50%), human accuracy (55%), or one afforded by a 100-item personality questionnaire (66%). Accuracy was similar across countries (the U.S., Canada, and the UK), environments (Facebook and dating websites), and when comparing faces across samples. Accuracy remained high (69%) even when controlling for age, gender, and ethnicity. Given the widespread use of facial recognition, our findings have critical implications for the protection of privacy and civil liberties.
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spelling pubmed-78013762021-01-12 Facial recognition technology can expose political orientation from naturalistic facial images Kosinski, Michal Sci Rep Article Ubiquitous facial recognition technology can expose individuals’ political orientation, as faces of liberals and conservatives consistently differ. A facial recognition algorithm was applied to naturalistic images of 1,085,795 individuals to predict their political orientation by comparing their similarity to faces of liberal and conservative others. Political orientation was correctly classified in 72% of liberal–conservative face pairs, remarkably better than chance (50%), human accuracy (55%), or one afforded by a 100-item personality questionnaire (66%). Accuracy was similar across countries (the U.S., Canada, and the UK), environments (Facebook and dating websites), and when comparing faces across samples. Accuracy remained high (69%) even when controlling for age, gender, and ethnicity. Given the widespread use of facial recognition, our findings have critical implications for the protection of privacy and civil liberties. Nature Publishing Group UK 2021-01-11 /pmc/articles/PMC7801376/ /pubmed/33431957 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-79310-1 Text en © The Author(s) 2021, corrected publication 2021 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) .
spellingShingle Article
Kosinski, Michal
Facial recognition technology can expose political orientation from naturalistic facial images
title Facial recognition technology can expose political orientation from naturalistic facial images
title_full Facial recognition technology can expose political orientation from naturalistic facial images
title_fullStr Facial recognition technology can expose political orientation from naturalistic facial images
title_full_unstemmed Facial recognition technology can expose political orientation from naturalistic facial images
title_short Facial recognition technology can expose political orientation from naturalistic facial images
title_sort facial recognition technology can expose political orientation from naturalistic facial images
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7801376/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33431957
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-79310-1
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