Social network status updates expose personal information

A status in social networks can determine not only the sex and age of a person, but also his or her psychological qualities, a team of scientists from Pennsylvania and the University of Cambridge believes.

The specialists have collected information about 136,000 Facebook users, who updated their statuses more than 13 million times. The scientists paid attention to vocabulary and found that the people used the words "girl" and "party" most often in their status updates.

By phrases in social networks, the experts were able to establish, who writes them. The newly obtained algorithm, the authors of the study believe, will be useful to advertisers, surveys and psychological tests.