A class project for a computer science class two years ago at Massachusetts Institute of Technology used �friend� links to determine if Facebook users were gay. In a similar project, a researcher at the University of Texas at Dallas was able to determine Facebook users� political affiliation. At the University of Maryland in College Park, Md., researchers used a number of information-gathering techniques on Facebook, Flickr, Dogster and BibSonomy and were able to extract significant personal information of users.
At MIT, the �Project Gaydar� student researchers Carter Jernigan and Behram Mistree, are working on an article for a professional journal about their Facebook research. It looked at the genders and sexual preferences of a subject�s online friends and predicted if the subject was gay. Using information about people they knew, the program worked for men, though less well for gay women.
Jason Kaufman, a research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University said, �Potentially everything you ever do on the Internet will live forever. I like to think we�ll all learn to give each other a little more slack for our indiscretions and idiosyncrasies.�
Project "Gaydar" story here.
If that information is going to live forever, social networkers might consider using an alias. Or just have a really diverse group of friends.
Tom Kelchner
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