Outings via Facebook: MIT students calculate who’s gay … well, the men anyway
”When they first did it, it was absolutely striking – we said, ‘Oh my God – you can actually put some computation behind that. That pulls the rug out from a whole policy and technology perspective that the point is to give you control over your information – because you don’t have control over your information.”
Hal Abelson, an MIT computer science professor of two students, Carter Jernigan and Behram Mistree, who created a program they call “Gaydar” that they say can predict who is gay based on the friends they have on Facebook. The development of the program came from an analysis that showed out gay men have significantly more gay friends. So, men who do not declare that they are gay, yet have gay male friends on their Facebook list, are more likely to be gay. However, the same program failed to predict who are lesbians or bisexual men and women. The researchers say their ability to do data mining of social networks so easily exposes further privacy concerns for people who use social networks, extending affiliations to religious or political conclusions as well. (Boston Globe)
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