Chinese inventors fear abuse of their web user profiling software

Mainland scientists have created a computer program they say can determine an internet user's personality with 90 per cent accuracy, but they fear it may too dangerous to let out of the lab without greater protection of people's privacy online.

The program was developed by researchers at the Computational Cyber Psychology Lab at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. It gathers publicly available details of a person's activities online, such as the daily number of Sina Weibo posts, and matches them with one of 800 different psychological profiles.

The research was funded by several government agencies, said Professor Zhu Tingshao, the laboratory's director.

"Each personality indicates a certain mental weakness, knowledge of which could be used to help or hurt people, depending on who uses it," said Zhu. "We have been very careful to keep the research within our laboratory. We do not allow any organisation or individual access to these tools."

Zhu said they had recently tested the program on more than 500 Weibo users, selected at random.

The same people agreed to complete written questionnaires and a comparison of results found a match of more than 90 per cent in most cases, Zhu said.