One of your most paranoid fears is coming true. Right now, MIT computer science students are running advanced algorithms to determine who on Facebook is gay. According to an article in the Boston Globe, two MIT computer whizzes wrote up “Project Gaydar,” a program that determines with alarming accuracy whether male Facebook users are gay or straight even if they don’t announce it on their profile. The program looks at the gender and sexuality of the person’s friends, which is public info on Facebook, to predict the sexuality of a specific individual. For some reason, it cannot determine who’s a lesbian.
This is kind of funny in a “science confirms what we always knew” kind of way, but it’s also TERRIFYING, right? In the future, your internet friends unintentionally out you to scientists. Also: how long until this become an all-too-quickly-used iPhone app?
via Gawker.
Let me take a stab at the possible correlations …. men who have more women friends, and gay friends, are more likely to be gay than men who have men friends.
Does this get me an honorary PhD at MIT?
How about this, if you’ve got a Facebook profile you’re a flaming homo?
“Certainly if most or many of your friends are of a particular religious or political or sexual category, others may conclude you are part of the same category – even if you haven’t said so yourself.”
What a scoop!
I’m sure the actual algorithms are very fancy, but putting it like that is not selling the workmanship.
Wow, just think… if the Nazis had this how many more homos could have been sent away to concentration camps. Let’s just hope it’s… accurate? God forbid I have a bunch of gay males and straight females for friends but I actually have sex with women… yikes! I could be mis-outed, just for breaking a stereotype!
“…inadvertently…” would be better than “…unintentionally…”