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'Gaydar' Facebook Experiment Reveals Sexual Orientation

by Amar Toor on September 21, 2009 at 05:29 PM

Your Facebook profile may be more impenetrable than Fort Knox, your personal information more elusive than the Gingerbread Man. But just how much of your behavior -- even your most intimate behavior -- could still fall through the cracks and into the jaws of statistical inference?

According to an unpublished 2007 MIT experiment (dubbed "Gaydar"), determining the sexuality of strangers may be as simple as browsing through their lists of friends. Using software to analyze the gender and sexuality of the Facebook friends of a sample of students, Carter Jernigan and Behram Mistree were able to accurately predict the sexual orientation of sample users; users with a higher percentage of homosexual friends were more likely to be gay themselves.

Or at least that's what two researchers pair claim, despite admitting to Boston.com that they have no way of checking every single prediction for accuracy. Also, there is no specific information detailing what percentage of your friends have to be gay for the study to determine that you're gay. Without any truly solid data, this study sounds a bit half-baked.

Regardless, what began as a school ethics project may give new insight to the ways we divulge information online. The experiment does raise some issues about the company we keep, which, until now, hasn't really been used (much less made available) as a way for anyone to extract personal information.

Unsettling as it may be to the individualist, these new methods of social networking analysis may well have the potential to render major components of our personas and behavior remarkably quantifiable. We're all leaving breadcrumbs. We just need to decide how big we want them to be. [From: The Boston Globe]

Tags: facebook, privacy, social networking, SocialNetworking, top

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