Students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created a computer program that they say can deduce whether or not someone is gay by doing an analysis of his Facebook profile, The Boston Globe reports.
According to The Globe, two students in a course on Internet ethics and law designed a program that looked at the profile information—including gender and sexuality—of a person’s Facebook friends and analyzed the information to predict the person’s sexuality. The students called the program “Gaydar.”
The students taught their computer program to make predictions by looking at profile information from profiles of 1,544 men who identified themselves as straight, 21 who said they were bisexual, and 33 who said they were gay. Then the students did the same analysis for 947 men who did not report their sexuality. The MIT students had no means of confirming their software’s conclusions about most of the men, but said they privately knew that 10 of the men identified themselves as gay but did not say so on their Facebook profiles. The program correctly determined the sexuality of all 10.
Carter Jernigan, one of the student creators of the program, told The Globe that the experiment highlighted the risk of how “information can be inadvertently shared.”
3 Responses to MIT Students’ Facebook ‘Gaydar’ Raises Privacy Issues
adhalter - September 23, 2009 at 10:31 am
Please explain to me why a program like this is important or needed? It is someone’s decision to disclose information related to their personal life on social networking sites.
afelinefan - September 23, 2009 at 11:10 am
All ya gotta do is look for the dudes with a topless pic.
susie_snowflake - September 26, 2009 at 10:41 am
Analysts have no problem inferring whether or not I am male or female by facebook activity, online surfing behavior, etc. No offense, but why should this be any different? Adhalter, maybe back up a step and ask why gender, age, race, etc. is important too.