How Your Facebook Friends Might Disclose Your Sexual Orientation

by Michael Jones · 2009-09-21 08:48:00 UTC
Topics:

Facebook

Ah, Facebook. When it's not telling you what Twilight character you are, it's there to let you know what 1980s professional wrestler you would be. But could Facebook also be spilling the beans about your sexual orientation, even if you don't publicly list who you're attracted to?

Perhaps, suggest two MIT students. Through the powers of intelligence that can really only exist at a place like MIT, students Carter Jernigan and Behram Mistree have developed a program that looks at all of your friends, and determines whether or not you're gay. And it's accuracy, at least in trial runs looking at men, is pretty stunning.

Jernigan and Mistree tested the program by first looking at 1,500 fellow students who disclosed their sexual orientation - gay, straight, or bisexual -- on their Facebook profiles. From this information they were able to glean that gay men had proportionally more gay friends than straight men. No surprise there, right?

That tidbit of information, however, turns out to be the cog on which this wheel turns.  According to the Telegraph, this fact allowed "the students to devise a computer program to predict the sexual orientation of other Facebook users based solely on the sexualities of their friends." Then the MIT students tested their program out on 10 "known" gay men who were not out on their Facebook profile, and voila, the program confirmed the sexual orientation of all 10 men.

This is pretty darn interesting, right? But it's also a little big brother-like. That's a fact not lost on MIT Professor Hal Abelson, who told the Boston Globe that this study confirms that we live in a world where online privacy is increasingly harder and harder to keep. Included among that is a person's decision whether to disclose their sexual orientation or not.

"When [the students] first did it, it was absolutely striking – we said, ‘Oh my God – you can actually put some computation behind that,'" said Abelson. "That pulls the rug out from a whole policy and technology perspective that the point is to give you control over your information - because you don’t have control over your information."

And maybe that's the real lesson here. To paraphrase Bill Clinton, the era of online privacy is over.

That is, if it ever even existed.

(Photo courtesy of Shazari's photostream on Flickr.)

Michael Jones is a Change.org Editor. He has worked in the field of human rights communications for a decade, most recently for Harvard Law School.
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