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Facebook Holds This Patent That Can Tell When You Will Die

A couple of days ago it was highlighted that Facebook holds a patent for a software that had the ability to turn on the mics of a smartphone to record ‘secret’ messages in TV ads. The company came out and denied that it will ever use the technology in the patent for any of its products. While that particular patent might not have caught the attention too much, perhaps this one will.

According to a report, Facebook holds a patent application that can even predict major life events such as “a birth, death or graduation.” The New York Times reports that this patent describes using posts and messages to predict when a certain event can actually occur. It also relies on information such as credit card transactions and location to predict these events.

According to a page on Google Patents, this particular one has been filed under “Predicting Life Changes of Members of Social Networking System”. Under the patent filed, the abstract reads like this: “To predict a life change event for a user of the social networking system, such as a change in marital status, relationship status, employment status, etc., the disclosed system generates a training set of data comprising historical data of other users who have gone through a life change event.”

It further reveals that the system uses training set data “to generate a prediction algorithm using machine learning models.” Simply put, there’s a prediction algorithm that relies on the data inputs by users to retrieve a prediction on important life events.

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