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

See All Reviews »

Review

Fred Gatlin
3.6
by Fred Gatlin - Sep. 21, 2009

As someone who has not succumbed to social media and has concerns about their value, this article points out another reason to question their worth. There is nothing factual about them and now we found out they tell more about us than we planned.

See All Reviews »

Fred's Rating

Overall
3.6

Good
from 11 answers
Quality
3.5
Facts
4.0
Fairness
3.0
Sourcing
4.0
Style
3.0
Context
3.0
Depth
3.0
Enterprise
4.0
Relevance
4.0
Popularity
4.0
Recommendation
4.0
Credibility
4.0
More How our ratings work »