In particular, with enough likes, it could deduce things such as gender, race and sexual orientation. Obviously in the wrong contexts, this information is extremely sensitive.
It then accurately deduced my gender, race, sexual orientation, age group, and other key data - all from a single paragraph.
No "likes" required anymore.
That said, the conclusions are very much expected. If i know what you like, i can know what kind of person you might be.
Nothing more was provided other than a paragraph of text I had previously written, the contents of which had nothing to do with me personally.
1) I'm self employed. 2) I'm always connected via a VPN connected to a continent that isn't my home continent. 3) I haven't connected to the internet via a "company" network in over five years.
I could infer that you are male from the way you type, and I guess you're somewhere between 25 and 35. I haven't looked up your username or anything else, it's just a "feeling".
Given millions of paragraphs of text linked to millions of known demographic and other data points (provided by Facebook), a paragraph is all a well-tuned system would need to make quite accurate assumptions about the person who typed the paragraph.
Again, likes are not required anymore.
I think you only really need one or two obvious tells for something like that. The guy you replied to used ", etc.". I think that alone puts him into the bracket you've given, so I'm fairly sure you're correct here. Looking forward to hearing if you are.
Btw, your inference is correct. Course, one could argue that it is informed by 25-35 males being one of the most common demographics on HN.