hal tweets ·11:28 AM
Ghostbuster zines from the Canzine Hollywood Piracy Zine Challenge are now online! http://t.co/RoAMEQTU
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Tue Sep 22,2009,
9:24 GMT
This Post Brought to You By Gaydar
Posted by Hal
Over and over again we are told that if we educate ourselves about the privacy policies of social network sites and implement their privacy options, we won’t have information we want to share with only a few hundred people ending up in the hands of thousands or millions of people we don’t know.
But a recent study done out of MIT that is not yet published, though reported on by the Boston Globe, tells us something different. The study, performed in 2007, basically concluded that you can tell if someone is gay by analyzing his friends on Facebook. Basically it’s the “birds of a feather flock together” principle. The study consisted of analyzing how many self identified gay guys other gay men have as Facebook friends. Once the magic number had been determined, a computer program then went through around 1000 guys in the MIT network who did not identity their sexuality, and predicted whether or not they were gay. The researchers used personal knowledge of some of the people in the study to confirm the accuracy of the computer program’s results.
Here are some interesting quotes from the article: “Discussions of privacy often focus on how to best keep things secret, whether it is making sure online financial transactions are secure from intruders, or telling people to think twice before opening their lives too widely on blogs or online profiles. But this work shows that people may reveal information about themselves in another way, and without knowing they are making it public. Who we are can be revealed by, and even defined by, who our friends are…If our friends reveal who we are, that challenges a conception of privacy built on the notion that there are things we tell, and things we don’t.”
“Computer scientists are identifying the ways in which anyone from a potential employer to an advertiser might be able to make informed guesses about a person. But there are limits to online privacy, and ultimately, say some experts, people will simply have to weigh the costs and benefits of living online.”
Bottom line: there is no privacy in peep, no matter how much control over your information you might think you have. I’m sure that a similar program could be developed to determine, based on your profile, if you were likely to vote, have a car, a kid, a dog, or even an affair.
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2:11
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1:33
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3:20
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The Bloggist
Hey, I’m Hal Niedzviecki. I’m a writer/thinker who lives in Toronto, Ontario, Canada with my wife and daughter. Up till now I’ve always considered myself a private person. But at the same time I’m fascinated by people who effortlessly open themselves up to the whole world. So I’ve… more...
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14:14
When reports like these come out, it makes me want to disappear from the internet altogether. To think that people can ‘figure out’ someone based on tidbits given online has been something I’ve grappled with for a couple years now.
It’s a double edged sword in the online world…and it’s getting scarier every day