The narcissism of the digital world

The narcissism of the digital world is not to blame for the never-ending erosion of our privacy.

Almost anything we do, from texting our friends to walking around our own home, may be feeding data into an algorithm without our knowledge.

The ease of following where the algorithms lead puts us all in the passenger seat of our own lives.

Can Big Data really know me better than I know myself? I gave the University of Cambridge Psychometrics Centre access to my X account.

According to its analysis of my social-media activity, I am less than conscientious, sometimes disagreeable and positively introverted.

But there are aspects of personality profiling that should still concern us.

Liking curly fries on Facebook was found to predict higher intelligence, for example.

Singer Sam Smith has decided to change his pronouns to THEY after a lifetime of being at war with my gender.

Singer wants to embrace himself for who I am, inside and out of the closet.

The idea that will do most to shape our immediate future is identity, he says.