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."

Comments

Re:MIT Gaydar should be Facebook app

[DarkOx]

not by probing them

Most of them would like that too though right?

Re:sexuality and sexual preferences

[AK Marc]

To muddy the waters, there aren't just 2 sexs as witnessed by the controversy over the gender or sex of that South African athlete in the news.

There are essentially two because there are an overwhelming number of XX or XY and the others are all medically classified as one or the other for gender. If you count them as "other" (whether a single other or a spectra), they are such a tiny percent of the population that it is essentially irrelevant.

I didn't find it but one athlete was barred from compeating in the 2000 Olympics because she had an X chromosome and therefore the Olympics Committee ruled she was a male, that despite the fact that she gave birth to a baby before their ruling.

That should be "Y" rather than "X" right? And there is an easy way to solve this. Make the rule, "Males have XY (and no other sex genes), females have XX (and no other sex genes) and anyone with a diagnosed gender disorder may not compete." After all, even if you read your own link, everyone in the "other" category has a medical disorder. You are male, female, or disorder (regardless of how your are classified after assessment). So I would think the Olympic ruling is sane. A Y-chromosome defines male. The organs the chromosome are supposed to trigger to be made do not.