In the twenty-first century, technology has surprised everyone with its long list of wonders and applications. Recently, the social media network giant, Facebook has filed a patent application for a technology that will automatically detect the users’ socio-economic status and classify them in one of the three classes – working class, middle class or upper class- something interesting!
According to the patent filed, the social media giant is looking forward to designing a system that collects users’ personal information, such as education, homeownership, and internet usage, in order to predict their socio-economic status. – DailyMail reported.
The details about the patent were publically released on Friday. The patent is based on an algorithm that is expected to improve Facebook’s targeting capabilities and providing an aid to serve users with more relevant advertisements.
“By predicting the socio-economic groups of users, (Facebook) is able to help the third party present sponsored content to the target users,” the patent read clearly. “Third parties are able to effectively promote their products or services, and the online system can provide a more engaging user experience to users,” it further added.
The whole judgment process goes like: Facebook would ask the users what is their age and from there, followed by the series of questions they would be targeting the users of that particular age group. For an instance, the 20-30-year-olds bracket will be asked about how many internet devices they own, while users belonging to 30 to 40 segment will be asked whether they own a house of their own or not- the report highlighted.
Though the company has filed a patent still it is unclear if the patent will be actually used for targeting the users by Facebook. The social media giant will consider other factors too like travel history, kind of devices, how many of them are connected to the internet and highest level of education, so as to predict the actual result. The company has skipped the idea of directly asking the user about their income as some people might not be comfortable with it and sharing information and credentials on the internet turns out to be dangerous sometimes. The actions performed by the user on Facebook will also be used to gather the results.
Let’s see when this feature is launched by Facebook!