OUR LATEST ISSUE
New software knows you're gay - even if you don't say so on your profile
Facebook friends can be used to identify gay men
Gay men can be identified just by analysing their Facebook friends, even if the rest of the information on their profile is set to private, new but unpublished research has revealed.
Two students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Carter Jernigan and Behram Mistree, found that it was possible to predict men's sexual orientation by analysing the gender and sexuality of their contacts.
They scanned the Facebook friends of more than 1,500 fellow students who indicated their sexual orientation - straight, gay or bisexual - on their profiles. The analysis revealed, unsurprisingly perhaps, that gay men had more gay friends than straight men, but it allowed the students to devise software to predict the sexual orientation of other Facebook users based only on the sexualities of their friends.
When they ran the programme on ten men who were known to be gay but did not reveal this information on their profiles, in every case it correctly identified them to be gay.
"When they first did it, it was absolutely striking - we said, 'Oh my God - you can actually put some computation behind that'," Hab Abelson, a MIT computer science professor told the Boston Globe.
"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."
But so far, the software only works on gay men: when it was used on the profiles of 947 people who did not disclose their sexual orientation on their profiles, it failed to accurately identify lesbians or bisexuals of either gender.
