Psychological profiling on the Web
Yesterday I ranted on Facebook about how annoyed I was with it. I've also had my share of emotional posts about various topics on Twitter. And I'm frequently opinionated in my blog postings on this site.
Unless you are following my writings on all the various sites, you might not know how cranky and critical I can be. My emotions and opinions may not be of concern to anyone beyond my close personal friends and co-workers (who have to listen to my occasional verbal tirades). But if you did care, there might soon be an easy way to track my online mood swings--a digital emo-meter, if you will.
Nitesh Dhanjani, senior manager and leader of application security services at Ernst & Young, and Akshay Aggarwal, Microsoft InfoSec team's practice manager for North America, are developing a "proof-of-concept" tool that analyzes a feed from peoples' various online presences. The dashboard looks at the stream for expressions of emotion in real time and uses colors to indicate different emotions.
