Facebook's new patent moderates your socio-economic status

If you are on Facebook, nothing is private anymore. Your feed portrays your interests, your friends’ interests, photos, videos, news and vice versa. The content you explore on Facebook is your personal interest, but in the future, this might not be the thing. The company filed a patent, which is an “online service” that predicts your socio-economic status like how much you earn, what you own etc. Basically, what this service does is algorithmically predict its users' socio-economic status without knowing their incomes. It might sound scary, but to makes things worse, the content you will be watching on your Facebook timeline in the future will be based on your socio-economic status.

According to a patent application filed in the US last July, “the system will use classifiers to predict which socio-economic group users belong to. Such a system would allow Facebook to more accurately target users with content and advertising tailored to their social class,” the company said.

"The classifiers use models that are trained using features based on global information about a population of users such as demographic information, device ownership, internet usage, household data, and socio-economic status," Facebook's patent application states.

A patent application filed in the US last July.

The Patent Publication illustrates the probability of a user, whether he’s a middle person or isn’t. This categorises the user by the number of devices he’s using/logged in, he’s highest education qualification etc. Facebook believes, where users who own up to six devices "belong to the upper class".

This judgemental service might be vexatious to the Facebook users in the future.