Next week at DEFCON, the good people of the Online Privacy Foundation will be giving a talk on their research regarding what a person's twitter usage reveals about their personality. Specifically, they are examining the (dark triad) psychological traits of narcissism, psychopathy and machiavellianism with a view to answering the question "Can twitter really help expose psychopath killer's traits?"
In particular, they propose to address:
1. Public understanding of psychopathy;
2. General public focus on whether we can spot psychopaths and therefore predict crime; and
3. Public perception that detecting personality from social media is infallible.
Of course, given that this is a talk by the Online Privacy Foundation, I would expect that they will touch on the troubling privacy implications of their research. The participants in the study were volunteers (cheered on by Stephen Fry, which could be said to be under the duress of awesome); participants in any sort of real world application of the research would not be, and we would find ourselves stuck in a bind between privacy and security. While its always difficult to know which way public policy is going to turn on these questions, something (PATRIOT Act) gives me a clue...
In any event, I imagine that this is a talk that will touch a few raw nerves this week. In fact, I would be worried that current events might overwhelmingly colour reactions to the topic.
Apparently the paper is going to be published a month-ish after DEFCON, so watch this space.
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