Representatives of the company Facebook patented a statistical methodology that determines the social and economic class of users of the social network.
Such an analysis will be based on the education, place of residence and history of the user's trips.
This is stated in the article of CBInsights analysts
According to journalists, the system learns to determine whether the user belongs to the "middle class", or to two other classes: rich and poor.
To do this, it will apply the so-called "decision tree" - a tool that is used in the compilation of statistics and data analysis.
This will take into account the user data that is available to Facebook.
The socio-economic situation will depend on the age of the individual, the level of education, the place of residence, the number of gadgets and the availability of own housing, the regularity of using the Internet and the history of travel.
Facebook notes that the patent is aimed at a "third party, which seeks to raise awareness about products or services of online users." To such "consumers of information" for example, include private corporations and charitable organizations.
It is likely that Facebook will be able to use the technology to target its advertising and other content more accurately.
The decision tree begins with the age of the user. This creates a benchmark for whether other data points will be important for determining the class, for example, having your own housing is a more significant indicator for a 30-40 year old audience than users of 20 years of age.
The system will also contain global information on market research, which will help teach the classifier to attributes associated with different socio-economic classes.
This patent company promulgated along with a number of other patents related to emotion tracking, because Facebook seems to be trying to get more and more detailed information about how users react to various ads, content and more.