"At MIT, an experiment that identifies which students are gay is raising new questions about online privacy. Using data from Facebook, two students in an MIT class on ethics and law on the electronic frontier made a striking discovery: just by looking at a person's online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay. The project, given the name 'Gaydar' by the students, is part of the fast-moving field of social network analysis, which examines what the connections between people can tell us, from predicting who might be a terrorist to the likelihood a person is happy, fat, liberal, or conservative."
MIT professor Hal Abelson, who co-taught the course, is quoted: "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."
back to /slashdot/ please
The thought of inferring information about someone from their friends and associates is hardly a new one, Humans do it all the time without realizing it.
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Anonymous2009-09-20 19:03
I'd be interested in the actual program (how it guesses a person's sexuality), as well as the details how the students actually got the data from Facebook (surely not by scraping?).
>>4 I doubt it would be very reliable.
That's what I thought too. And since all it uses is only a little amount of data about friends (gender & sexuality), then there isn't really anything revolutionary involved and the problem doesn't really have much more to do with computer science than simply gathering data.
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Anonymous2009-09-20 21:53
hay, everybody!
i just had a MAJOR compsci breakthrough! this will change the world!
it turns out, that guys who have a lot of gay friends on facebook are often gay themselves!!!! HOLY SHIT!!! I"M A GENUS!
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Anonymous2009-09-20 22:02
I`M A PHYLUM
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Anonymous2009-09-20 22:04
now that we can identify the gays the next step is the cure them of their faggotry
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Anonymous2009-09-20 22:07
Next step: A program that identifies if a facebook user is black.
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Anonymous2009-09-20 22:11
>>9
I think the next step is for everyone to stop masturbating over everything that comes out of MIT (SICP, scheme, etc. excluded)
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Anonymous2009-09-20 22:18
>>10
This includes swinging on Prof. Sussman's nutsack.
>>12 >>12
Homosexuality is an unproductive mutation, and as such it need to be purged from the gene pool.
It's a pity the Nazi'a gave eugenics a bad name.
def is_gay(bbcode):
if bbcode == fail:
print 'is gay'
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Anonymous2009-09-21 1:00
>>1-22
Stop it guys, I'm not [i]gay[/gay] I just help out a little.
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Anonymous2009-09-21 4:02
Alan Touring's sodomized anus is rolling in its grave.
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Anonymous2009-09-21 4:37
I don't have Facebook but isn't there a sexual orientation option in your profile?
MAYBE THAT'S HOW THEY FIGURED IT OUT!
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Anonymous2009-09-21 4:48
A few years later, he writes a book - Structure and Interpretation of Interpersonal Relationships. After staying on the best-seller list for 14 months, he retires rich, only to take up a job as an Uncle Advice for a teen magazine.
Cue credits.
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Anonymous2009-09-21 6:13
Structure and Interpretation of Complex Personalities