How Your Facebook Friends Might Disclose Your Sexual Orientation

Published September 21, 2009 @ 08:48AM PT

Facebook

Ah, Facebook. When it's not telling you what Twilight character you are, it's there to let you know what 1980s professional wrestler you would be. But could Facebook also be spilling the beans about your sexual orientation, even if you don't publicly list who you're attracted to?

Perhaps, suggest two MIT students. Through the powers of intelligence that can really only exist at a place like MIT, students Carter Jernigan and Behram Mistree have developed a program that looks at all of your friends, and determines whether or not you're gay. And it's accuracy, at least in trial runs looking at men, is pretty stunning.

Jernigan and Mistree tested the program by first looking at 1,500 fellow students who disclosed their sexual orientation - gay, straight, or bisexual -- on their Facebook profiles. From this information they were able to glean that gay men had proportionally more gay friends than straight men. No surprise there, right?

That tidbit of information, however, turns out to be the cog on which this wheel turns. According to the Telegraph, this fact allowed "the students to devise a computer program to predict the sexual orientation of other Facebook users based solely on the sexualities of their friends." Then the MIT students tested their program out on 10 "known" gay men who were not out on their Facebook profile, and voila, the program confirmed the sexual orientation of all 10 men.

This is pretty darn interesting, right? But it's also a little big brother-like. That's a fact not lost on MIT Professor Hal Abelson, who told the Boston Globe that this study confirms that we live in a world where online privacy is increasingly harder and harder to keep. Included among that is a person's decision whether to disclose their sexual orientation or not.

"When [the students] first did it, it was absolutely striking – we said, ‘Oh my God – you can actually put some computation behind that,'" said Abelson. "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."

And maybe that's the real lesson here. To paraphrase Bill Clinton, the era of online privacy is over.

That is, if it ever even existed.

(Photo courtesy of Shazari's photostream on Flickr.)

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Comments (10)

The point to me is who cares what you do in the privicy of your home with who ever....

CFJ

Posted by Cherokee Fred Jesus on 09/21/2009 @ 12:02PM PT
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It's looks like secretley gay men can't hide on Facebook. However, coming out, with willpower, eventually comes. I'm a straight ally. Those MIT students created a powerful program with good accuracy in determining one's sexual orientation. Although the program shows that, the real purpose of that program is to show an advance in technology, not necessarily to invade privacy. Putting the truth on one's sexual orientation should be a must on Facebook profile.

Posted by Edwin Bonilla on 09/21/2009 @ 12:19PM PT
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Who the hell are you? You are a Nazi fascist that's who. I am gay and it's none of anyone's goddam business. In Canada we have a right to privacy. I am not a criminal. We do not need to be tagged or tattooed like in a Nazi Camp. God, people like you make me sick.

Posted by Demonized 2death on 09/21/2009 @ 09:07PM PT
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Demonized, I don't think that Mr. Bonilla meant that the way you have understood. I think English is his second language, and therefore sometimes the message is lost in translation.

He's definitely not a Nazi fascist, nor is he a Talibangelical. He has consistently been a very strong ally for the LGBT community.

Posted by Dave Hershey on 09/22/2009 @ 05:36PM PT
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Mr. 2 death...

I dont believe that mr. bonilla meant any insult to you or anyone else...Well, maybe except for the homohaters.

Posted by Thomas McHugh on 09/24/2009 @ 09:07PM PT
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The irony to me is that I would be one of the few heterosexual men with more gay friends than straight...

Ironic indeed.

Posted by Thomas McHugh on 09/21/2009 @ 03:52PM PT
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All this shows is that MIT professors obviously don't give enough homework. After all, couldn't most people figure out that if you don't list your sexual orientation and have an abundance of gay friends then you're probably gay?

Heck, I don't even have to look at friends. When my mate from high school refrains from listing his orientation, but all of his pictures involve his arms around a particular guy and he lists The Lost Language of Cranes amongst his favourite books...well, you do the math.

Posted by Tobias Fangor on 09/21/2009 @ 10:20PM PT
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I have a Facebook account but only a dozen are gay friends so I don't know if the company knows I am gay or not. A funny thing happened though when I registered for anonline account for people interested in Swimming. One person did ask me if I was gay. You never know who will figure out.

Posted by Martin Martinez on 09/22/2009 @ 08:40AM PT
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Am I the only one underwhelmed by these results? Just testing "known gays" doesn't address the possibility of false positives. I could write a computer program that says "Gay!" for every input, and it would have the same results as these student's programs. Now I took a class with MIT students (I went to a different school in the area) and I know them to be pretty smart. But I can also think of some straight people who, say, were involved in theater programs who may very well have rung up as gay under this system, but whom, I can tell you from opening the wrong door at a party once, are in fact straight.

Posted by Alex Edelman on 09/25/2009 @ 09:05AM PT
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Reckon that just shows that theres no such thing as a perfect system.

Posted by Thomas McHugh on 09/27/2009 @ 04:34PM PT
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Michael is the Communications Director for the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School, and previously was Communications Director for Pax Christi USA, a progressive Catholic human rights organization.