As Facebook users, we take it as a given that the company already knows more about us than it should – including the details of our personal lives. Indeed, the social media giant is keenly interested in its users’ dating habits, even going so far as to launch its own online dating service. However, according to a recent report in Vox, Facebook could soon take the creep factor a step further and actually begin to predict when people will break up.

Researchers with the Imperial College Business School in London worked in conjunction with the dating site eHarmony to determine whether or not smart home assistants, like the Facebook Portal, could be used to tell if a relationship is on the rocks. The answer, unsurprisingly, is yes.

“We have a model that can predict the fate of a relationship fairly accurately, but no one has operationalized it or incorporated it into a device or a dating app and said, ‘Okay, use this,’” one of the study’s co-authors, Aparna K. Sasidharan, told Vox. “But if people are accepting of it, it can be done very soon.”

Believe it or not, there are serious monetary benefits for Facebook to be able to predict breakups like this. People who have just gone through a split are statistically more likely to spend a lot of money, which means the platform’s advertisers would kill to know that info. So in other words, it’s probably only a matter of time until Facebook is snooping even further into our love lives.

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