KnowMe and ShareMe: understanding automatically discovered personality traits from social media and user sharing preferences

There is much recent work on using the digital footprints left by people on social media to predict personal traits and gain a deeper understanding of individuals. Due to the veracity of social media, imperfections in prediction algorithms, and the sensitive nature of one's personal traits, much research is still needed to better understand the effectiveness of this line of work, including users' preferences of sharing their computationally derived traits. In this paper, we report a two- part study involving 256 participants, which (1) examines the feasibility and effectiveness of automatically deriving three types of personality traits from Twitter, including Big 5 personality, basic human values, and fundamental needs, and (2) investigates users' opinions of using and sharing these traits. Our findings show there is a potential feasibility of automatically deriving one's personality traits from social media with various factors impacting the accuracy of models. The results also indicate over 61.5% users are willing to share their derived traits in the workplace and that a number of factors significantly influence their sharing preferences. Since our findings demonstrate the feasibility of automatically inferring a user's personal traits from social media, we discuss their implications for designing a new generation of privacy-preserving, hyper-personalized systems.