Facebook Gaydar. MIT students don’t have something better to do?

Sep
28

Facebook Gaydar. MIT students don’t have something better to do?

We all know the death of privacy is imminent. We are so plugged into everyone else and everyone is so plugged into us, that even minor life happenings are oft posted and recorded for posterity. However, it is often taken for granted that are you leaving an electronic trail everytime you update a status or add a friend.

A couple of students at MIT picked up on this trail and turned it into a “Gaydar” of sorts:

Using data from the social network Facebook, they made a striking discovery: just by looking at a person’s online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay. They did this with a software program that looked at the gender and sexuality of a person’s friends and, using statistical analysis, made a prediction. The two students had no way of checking all of their predictions, but based on their own knowledge outside the Facebook world, their computer program appeared quite accurate for men, they said.

While this may, in the interim, serve as locker room fodder and crude humor, the applications are pretty much endless. Ferreting out political affiliations, sexual promiscuity, drinking habits and drug use… Even if you’ve never inhaled and certainly never posted about it, a lot can be inferred by the (online) company you keep.

via [Discoblog]