Project ‘Gaydar’: An MIT experiment raises new questions about online privacy

At MIT, an experiment identifies which students are gay, raising new questions about online privacy

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 ... Full Story »

Posted by Kaizar Campwala - via MuckRack, Boston Globe

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Review

Randy Morrow
3.3
by Randy Morrow - Sep. 21, 2009

“In general, it’s not too surprising that someone might make inferences about someone else without knowing that person based on who the person’s friends are. This isn’t specific to Facebook and is entirely possible in the real world as well,” Axten wrote in an e-mail. Jason Kaufman, a research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University who is studying a set of Facebook data. “Potentially everything you ever do on the Internet will live forever. I like to think we’ll all learn to give each other a little more slack for our indiscretions and idiosyncrasies.”

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