Wanna find out if he's gay? There's an app for that.
Internet mavens are excited about some breakthrough social networking research, fresh out of the minds of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. So what's the technology that's garnering the extra attention? An apparently proven gaydar application.
Yep, with Carter Jernigan and Behram Mistree's new software, an examination of 947 profiles correctly "identified all 10 of 10 men the students knew to be gay, but who had not declared so on Facebook, according to a summary in The Boston Globe," reports Gawker.com. The researchers say their goal was to uncover what social networking users are unknowingly telling about themselves in this new age of oversharing and online friending.
The findings actually blow the lid off accepted notions that users control the flow of their information with privacy settings and what they choose to add, such as photos and status updates. According to the Globe, the research found:
"Just by looking at a person’s online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay. They did this with a software program that looked at the gender and sexuality of a person’s friends and, using statistical analysis, made a prediction. The two students had no way of checking all of their predictions, but based on their own knowledge outside the Facebook world, their computer program appeared quite accurate for men, they said. People may be effectively ‘outing’ themselves just by the virtual company they keep.
“’When they first did it, it was absolutely striking -- we said, “Oh my God -- you can actually put some computation behind that,”’ said Hal Abelson, a computer science professor at MIT who co-taught the course. ‘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.’”
Read more about the implications of the new research in The Boston Globe here.
Tell us: Do you "stalk" prospective friends, dates, employees, and/or associates on the Internet? Is information sharing on social networks hurting or benefiting interpersonal relationships?
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