How many "Facebook friends" do we really know?

When we talk about the dangers of not taking care of our privacy on the Internet, it is rare for us that we automatically think of sophisticated computer program designed to extract important data from our continuous interactions with the network: enter our card number in an online payment box, fill out a registration form on a specific website, or even search by keywords in Google.

However, it is becoming more and more common that the information that data analysts and specialists work with data mining They are not lines that we have typed in Internet spaces that we thought were private and protected, but the things we do in social media open to many people. In other words, what jeopardizes our privacy are the actions we take in Internet so that information about us reaches more people and, at the same time, have information about others.

Privacy on Facebook

The clearest example of this lack of voluntary privacy we could have before our noses, in the number of people we have added as friends in the most important social network:

Facebook. It is becoming more and more common to have a massive number of people added, even if our profile is not created to promote our products or services.

An interesting study

At this point, it is not worth asking what percentage of these people is made up of friends, but simply, How many of these people that we have added on Facebook are we able to recognize. The answer, according to research conducted by a series of scientists from California State University and Yale University, is that friends and acquaintances they could not even add up to 75% of the people we have added on Facebook, at least with the sample used (a part of the population American).

In other words, the number of people we really know from the list of our contacts on Facebook could only represent a proportion of 3 out of 4 individuals. The rest of the people? We have serious problems remembering your name or surname.

Do you recognize this person?

The article that reports on the research, published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior, gives more clues about how this study was set up.

To collect the data, the team of researchers designed a computer program called What's Her Face (book) in which each of the more than 4,000 participants who tried it had to enter the name, surname or first and last name of people randomly chosen from your contact list in Facebook. The "file" on the person to be identified contained only five photographs: the profile image and four photos in which she was tagged.

In case of entering only a first or last name, one of the letters could be missed so that the attempt could be count as a hit, while if a name and at least one last name were entered, a margin of 3 letters of error. Participants were encouraged to identify as many people as possible in 90 seconds, which was how long the game lasted, and they could replay as many times as they wanted. The average number of games played by each person was 4 times.

The result? On average, participants were only able to identify 72.7% of their Facebook friends, which were an average of 650. In other words, of the average of 650 people added on Facebook, the participants were only able to say the name of 472 of them, not even 3 out of 4 people added in this network Social.

In detail

Beyond this result obtained as a mean, there are some differences between subgroups of individuals. Differences that, in any case, do not even close to covering the distance that goes from the average of 72.7% to 100% of successes that theoretically would be expected if the participants' Facebook friends were also friends in life real.

For example, men proved better at identifying other men, while women also proved to be more adept at recognizing people of the same sex.

In addition, women generally performed better than men, getting the right name in 74.4% of the occasions, while men obtained an average of correct answers of the 71%.

On the other hand, unsurprisingly, those with fewer people on their contact list performed better: around 80% of correct answers that contrast with 64.7 of correct answers in people with more people added.

A slight advantage

Theoretically, the results obtained by people who had already played before should be better than the results. of the rest, having had the opportunity to have more time to identify the people who initially did not know acknowledged. What's more, every time a person failed to identify, the name of that Facebook contact would appear on the screen, which should give you a significant advantage in getting a good score next turn.

However, the people who played the most times only got to improve an average of 2% of their score obtained, a Increase that seems ridiculous considering the number of times that it continues to fail even in the last tried.