Facebook Gaydar – Turns out that gay men can be outed by analyzing who their Facebook friends are using a “gaydar” search tool, according to unpublished research by two students at MIT.
Their facebook “gaydar” study found that it was possible to predict men’s sexual orientation by analyzing the gender and sexuality of their contacts on the social networking site – even if the rest of the information on their profile is set to private.
The small-scale survey indicates that people who believe they have discreet online habits may still be making personal information about themselves public.
As part of the study, MIT researchers Carter Jernigan and Behram Mistree scanned the Facebook friends of more than 1,500 fellow students who indicated their sexual orientation – straight, gay or bisexual – on their profiles.
This analysis revealed that homosexual men had proportionally more gay friends than straight men, allowing the students to devise a computer program to predict the sexual orientation of other Facebook users based solely on the sexualities of their friends.
They ran their “gaydar” program on 10 men who were known to be homosexual but did not reveal this information on their profiles. In each case, the software correctly identified the men 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,’ ” Hal 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.”
In total the researchers ran their software on 947 people who did not disclose their sexual orientation on their profiles, but while it did correctly identify 90% of homosexuals, it failed to accurately identify lesbians or bisexuals of either gender.
Jernigan and Mistree say they are attempting to get their study, titled Gaydar, published in a scientific journal.
And that’s the latest on the new app, Facebook gaydar.
Tags: facebook, facebook apps, facebook gaydar, gay, gaydar
October 30th, 2009 at 10:12 pm
who coined the term Gaydar anyway?