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
My first thought as a gay man is why run some program, just look at my profile. You can figure out if I'm gay? So what? As to privacy, we all gave that up willingly when we decided to live our lives on the internet. We may not like to think about it, but that's the way it is. So do what you want, enjoy the life you have or cower in whatever closet you may hide in, it's up to each of us to decide.