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Facebook Ads Could 'Out' Gay Users
itwbennett writes "Researchers at Microsoft Research India and the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Germany have written a paper showing that a users may be inadvertently revealing their sexual preference to advertisers. 'One example was an advertisement for a nursing program at a medical college in Florida, which was only shown to gay men. The researchers said that persons seeing the ad would not know that it had been exclusively aimed at them solely based on their sexuality, nor would they realize that clicking on the ad would reveal to the advertiser, by implication, their sexual preference in addition to other information they might expect to be sent, such as their IP (Internet Protocol) address.' For its part, Facebook 'downplayed the study, saying that the site does not pass any personally identifiable information back to an advertiser.'"
A year ago, some MIT undergrads wrote up a short piece called Project Gaydar which showcased how they were able to successfully identify gay men who were still in the closet.
Facebook might not expose this information directly (via the "sexual preferences" profile information), but your friends list is enough to extrapolate it. Since there's money in that kind of data and it is easily fetched via the Facebook API, it's being done.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
According to several of my (very out) gay friends, putting your sexuality on facebook tends to lend its self to a lot of random messages from people who want to meet up at truck stops.
No joke.
sig?
Did you not read the article? This was information that was marked as private, but obviously is not. That's the problem.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
They fixed this a while ago.
A combination of "Gender" and "Interested in".
"Stop failing the Turing test!" -- Dilbert