User profiling from user generated content (UGC) is a common practice that
supports the business models of many social media companies. Existing systems
require that the UGC is fully exposed to the module that constructs the user
profiles. In this paper we show that it is possible to build user profiles
without ever accessing the user's original data, and without exposing the
trained machine learning models for user profiling -- which are the
intellectual property of the company -- to the users of the social media site.
We present VirtualIdentity, an application that uses secure multi-party
cryptographic protocols to detect the age, gender and personality traits of
users by classifying their user-generated text and personal pictures with
trained support vector machine models in a privacy-preserving manner.