Automated, accurate, and cheap personality assessment tools could affect society in many ways: marketing messages could be tailored to users’ personalities; recruiters could better match candidates with jobs based on their personality; products and services could adjust their behavior to best match their users’ characters and changing moods; and sci- entists could collect personality data without burdening par- ticipants with lengthy questionnaires. Furthermore, in the future, people might abandon their own psychological judg- ments and rely on computers when making important life decisions, such as choosing activities, career paths, or even romantic partners. It is possible that such data-driven decisions will improve people’s lives.
However, knowledge of people’s personalities can also be used to manipulate and influence them (28). Understandably, people might distrust or reject digital technologies after realizing that their government, internet provider, web browser, online social network, or search engine can infer their personal character- istics more accurately than their closest family members. We hope that consumers, technology developers, and policy- makers will tackle those challenges by supporting privacy-pro- tecting laws and technologies, and giving the users full control over their digital footprints.