You are what you Facebook ‘like’

To Facebook -- the 1.35-billion-user behemoth where we increasingly record our daily choices -- no person, comment or casual thumbs-up is isolated: Everything is part of a larger pattern.

Facebook is inferring millions correlations, based on billions of disparate data points, predicting any number of user behaviors. In many cases, it’s also selling those data points back to advertisers, political campaigns and other people who are interested in manipulating all the tiny daily choices you make. In an update made to Facebook’s ad platform in May, the site released a trove of new, anonymized data to advertisers, showing them -- among other things -- the demographics and “liked” pages of potential customers, the better to help companies learn their “interests and behaviors.”