Facebook friendships reveal sexual orientation

The column was originally published in the Sept. 23 issue of the Beacon, and can be viewed online here.

Anyone familiar with Facebook stalking knows a number of things can be inferred from one’s profile, without such information being explicitly included.

For example, when someone purports to love The Nation (which describes itself as “the flagship of the left”) but does not list their political preference, it’s a pretty safe bet to infer a liberal political leaning. Likewise, someone who lists Thomas Paine in their favorite quotations (or attests to their love of Ron Paul) is likely a Libertarian (or maybe not. Oh the flaws of Facebook stalking). And anyone who mentions Ann Coulter (without a clause of hate attached) is likely a Conservative or a liberal-hater at the least.

For homosexual men, it now seems that a listing of sex (”male”) and intentionally ambiguously blank “interested in” section is not the only indication of gayness on Facebook. Two Massachusetts Institute of Technology students developed a program called “Gaydar” which predicts whether or not a man is homosexual by evaluating his friends’ gender and sexuality: “Using data from the social network Facebook, they made a striking discovery: Just by looking at a person’s online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay,” according to a Sept. 20 Boston Globe article.

The students’ findings have not yet been published. And no, the program is not available, as of yet at least, for those of you interested in outing your Facebook friends of ambiguous sexuality. (The program also fails to identify lesbians and bisexuals; it can only detect homosexual men.)

This nifty, insightful new program, however, is not the reason behind writing this column. As Behram Mistree, one of the creators of “Gaydar,” commented in a Sept. 22 ABCNews.com article, the importance of this discovery lies in the privacy issues that result from the fact that such inferences can be made: “We thought that our work demonstrated a new threat to privacy that we wanted individuals to be aware of.”

Of course, sexuality is not the only private information that might be inferred by such a program or even by a particularly insightful Facebook stalker.

“Who we are can be revealed by, and even defined by, who our friends are: If all your friends are over 45, you’re probably not a teenager; if they all belong to a particular religion, it’s a decent bet that you do, too,” the Boston Globe article warned. “The ability to connect with other people who have something in common is part of the power of social networks but also a possible pitfall. 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.”

Does this mean we should un-friend anyone who would seem to discredit the image of ourselves that we hope to convey to the rest of our social networking community? Certainly not. (It might be a good idea to un-friend anyone (for example, Osama bin Laden) with whom your association might reveal your secret identity (as a terrorist) or otherwise covert plans.)

It is good to be aware of the privacy we lose by putting our personal information, whether explicitly or implicitly, into the swirling vortex of information that is the Internet.

If you haven’t already, it might be a good idea to re-evaluate your Facebook privacy settings at the very least. (Check out this link for a guide to some privacy settings whose existence you may have never even imagined.)