Outing Gay Men By Their Facebook Friends
The article below was taken from Change.org If you are gay and on Facebook then here is a little food for thought. Using the “Interested In” field on Facebook, users can self-identify as straight, gay, or bisexual. LGBT people who aren’t out of the closet can leave the field blank and not list their sexual orientation on their page. But if you don’t want to be out on Facebook, you may want to be careful who you accept as a friend. MIT students designed an algorithm to determine a user’s sexual orientation based on their friends’ sexual orientations. Tests of the algorithm show that it is fairly successful in determining the sexuality of gay men (but not, however, very good at identifying lesbians or bisexual men and women). With all the buzz about Facebook and privacy, users are concerned perhaps more than ever with controlling their information. But controlling your information is more difficult when it can be predicted by information on your friends’ profiles. Luckily the algorithm only makes predictions, and can’t actually out anyone with complete accuracy. But why does the algorithm work so well?
