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MIT Project "Gaydar" Shakes Privacy Assumptions
theodp writes "At MIT, an experiment that identifies which students are gay is raising new questions about online privacy. Using data from Facebook, two students in an MIT class on ethics and law on the electronic frontier made a striking discovery: just by looking at a person's online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay. The project, given the name 'Gaydar' by the students, is part of the fast-moving field of social network analysis, which examines what the connections between people can tell us, from predicting who might be a terrorist to the likelihood a person is happy, fat, liberal, or conservative." MIT professor Hal Abelson, who co-taught the course, is quoted: "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."
My Kingdom for a mod point! Not being able to ask someone out for fear of mutual embarrassment and summary rejection is surely a weighty cross to bear.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
Back in my day, college was all about drinking, sex and illicit drug use.
greed@All_Evils:~#
> I am really curious if it thinks I'm gay (does it consider bisexuality?). Also, this could be useful as a dating tool; if you
> don't know if the object of your affections is gay or not, run them through MIT Gaydar, and then possibly feel more secure about
> asking them out.
I'm sure this'll go down well in Iraq:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/13/iraq-gays-murdered-militias
Then again, typically I can tell if someone is gay just from looking at their record collection...
[..] predicting who might be a terrorist to the likelihood a person is happy, fat, liberal, or conservative.
Or? And an exclusive one too! You could as well go to the cave and bang on a piece of wood, "blarg good! wuoargh baad! ughwharrk!". You wouldn't stand out a bit.
Here, in the world of 21st century Homo sapiens sapiens, we aware of simple basic playschool-level facts, like that
1. Every property is a dimension in property space.
2. Every dimension has a gradient. (Possibly quantized on the Planck level of space-time, depending on what theories you believe in.)
3. If the properties are not exactly opposite to each other (making them one dimension with negative values), they are not exactly opposite.
4. The state of every position on every dimension may or may not be relative to any of the other positions of the other dimensions in property space, depending on their orthogonality.
My god, is this that hard to understand?
— Sheldon Cooper
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/13/iraq-gays-murdered-militias
I think that's got to be the most misleading URL EVER. I was like .... "Sweet! The homos finally got some payback!" ... but noooo.
P.S. You may want to put up a content warning next time you link to pictures of dead bodies with their brains splattered on the ground. Not doing so is considered a bit of a faux-pas in online communities. Even worse than using the salad fork to eat your desert.