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

Jim Lang
3.4
by Jim Lang - Sep. 21, 2009

Reports on an MIT student project to apply data mining to Facebook to find out more about people than they are willing to post in their profiles. Interesting results but a pretty light report. The warnings concerning unanticipated breaches of privacy cover familiar ground.

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