Facebook, the social media giant, is known for its AI development and research works. In that light, it appears that they are in the works over a new kind of technology with which to determine how ‘rich’ users are, without having to get information on how much they really earn.
With this, it is expected that the company will be able to better target its campaigns and ads to the relevant demographic to ensure getting the best results.
This information is made public, all thanks to a patent application filed by the Zuckerberg-owned company last July. According to what was obtainable on paper at the time, this technology will make use of online classifiers to group people into different socio-economic class of the society.
Facebook says there will have a lot of sources for these classifiers that would be used in making the classification. According to the social media giant,
The classifiers use model 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.”
From what has been released, it looks probable that what Facebook is attempting would work and work well too. In the patent tree, it is detailed that if, for example, a user who falls in the 20 – 30 age range had a degree and multiple devices with which they connected to the internet with, that would probably pitch them as a middle-class person.
The range of device ownership that would signify someone in the middle class is pegged at 2 – 5, while those having more would be grouped as being in the upper class of society.
Of course, there would be some inner workings that the company would not discuss publicly for protection of intellectual property, but from what we have heard, there is no doubt about this. Whether this information would be used exclusively by factbook or shared publicly is yet unknown, but the bridge would soon be reached… and crossed.