A study from researchers at the University of Vermont and the University of Adelaide found that access to as few as eight of our contacts is enough to enable predictive or machine learning technologies to achieve up to 95% accuracy in guessing what a person will post.

From an abstract of the study, titled “Information flow reveals prediction limits in online social activity” and published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour on Monday:

Information is so strongly embedded in a social network that, in principle, one can profile an individual from their available social ties even when the individual forgoes the platform completely.

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