theodp writes "At MIT, an experiment that identifies which students are gay is raising new questions about online privacy. Using data from Facebook, two students in an MIT class on ethics and law on the electronic frontier made a striking discovery: just by looking at a person's online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay. The project, given the name 'Gaydar' by the students, is part of the fast-moving field of social network analysis, which examines what the connections between people can tell us, from predicting who might be a terrorist to the likelihood a person is happy, fat, liberal, or conservative." MIT professor Hal Abelson, who co-taught the course, is quoted: "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."
"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."
I have control over my information. And that is why you wont find be on Facebook.
But your friends know you. And they may, in fact, be posting information about you. Everything from tagging pictures to leaving notes. You have no control over this.
But your friends know you. And they may, in fact, be posting information about you. Everything from tagging pictures to leaving notes. You have no control over this.
That's true to a point. But on some level that's not 'your information' that's others information about you. You couldn't stop your friends from outing you as gay or communist or vegetarian in the 60s and you can't today. Facebook isn't really a factor.
However, in terms of data mining and automated profiling etc its worse if you have a facebook account than if you don't. If someone tags a non-FB member its just a name attached to a photo. It doesn't really go anywhere. Its true that someone could see it or read a note mentioning you and connect it to you, or do sophisticated data mining to link all those references together and assemble a profile... but if you tag someone who is a fb member (the way they want you to) it creates a link back to that account, making it utterly TRIVIAL to connect it back to you.
I'm not on facebook. So while there may be some pictures on it with my name tagged to them, its not really any worse than the web in general. My name/photo is together in a few places online, but they aren't all linked together back to a single 'account' somewhere. If there are tagged photos of me on fb its the same, they are their but all disconnected. If you have a facebook account they'd all link back to that.
My 'privacy' isn't absolute. I don't expect it to be impossible for people find stuff about me online. But I do object strongly to stuff like facebook where a single company is handed tons of data self-documented by its own users... its idiotic that anyone would participate.
And people can still google it and it can still ruin your life.
Do you feel beholden to the idiots who make snap judgments of others based on indirect or second hand information? These McCarthyists with their lists of Facebook URLs have the power to ruin your life? How so? Why is it you've delegated this power to others who lack the wits to exercise considered judgment? Or is it instead the case that the photos from your personal life present you doing things that no reasonable person would do?
There's an element of chicken shit to take the anonymous court of public opinion quite so seriously. It often stems from the desire to substitute dignity with irreproachableness. Part of the deal with dignity is accepting that you can't force others to draw the right conclusions. If you take the opposite approach and try to control what people conclude about you, you'll discover one of two things: a) you're sucking up to the rich and powerful, or b) the people whose opinions you have successfully shaped have no significance. Option (a) works, if that's what you want.
I'm personally looking forward to the generation where when you look for someone on the web, and find nothing at all, you judge what that person might be hiding more seriously than you judge the ordinary defects of those who fear less to make themselves known.
But your friends know you. And they may, in fact, be posting information about you.
Correction: People who claim to be my friends may be posting information about me. The only ones who are my friends are those that I acknowledge as such.
The world is full of people who claim to be the friend of some rich, influential or important people. That you or any others actually believe anything they have to say demonstrates your gullibility and susceptibility to scams or cons. Although this has been going on for ages, th Interweb has made this both easier and more difficult to exploit. Easier, because many people are gullible enough to believe someone when they say, "I know so and so" without checking the veracity of their claim. More difficult because the structure of some social networking sites makes it easy to verify the bidirectionality of these links. Blow hards who claim to know everyone, but are unkown, or just not acknowledged, by the other parties are easy to expose.
I value my privacy. And my true friends know this. So the more information a person posts about me in public, the less likely it is that they are a friend. And the more likely it is that the info. may be incorrect.
You can tag them, but I don't think it's searchable. Even if it were, unless your name is Zaphod Beeblibrox, chances are there are hundreds of people tagged under the same name, so it'd be rather difficult to go through them and figure out which one is you.
"Do you actually have the slightest idea what you just said? I understand that America-bashing is fashionable these days..."
It would help if we didn't make it so easy. Like it or not, America is the gold-standard for 'sex is bad' (and 'skin = sex', therefore 'skin = bad'). Of course we inherited a goodly part of the from our English cousins, which brings us to:
"Ask Alan Turing about how tolerant Europeans can be about sexual orientation."
Alan lived and died in England, where his sexuality was illegal. I'm not sure if England considers themselves 'European' yet, but certainly most countries (not all) in continental Europe were more tolerant about sexual preference 50 years ago than most Americans today.
Too late. If it's bad, I don't care where it's worse. It's bad in the US. Go to some place like New Zealand. You'll find many straight people saying "partner" in relation to their spouse or unmarried life partner. When the terminology is such where a committed pair of gays and a committed straight couple can talk without having the words they choose reveal something about themselves, then you know you are free. The US still pushes terminology that separates gays. If they want to talk family at work, they either have to lie, or they are revealed in the first sentence. Tolerance isn't trying to pretend it doesn't matter. Tolerance is an apathy of the personal details of others. Masturbate to wildlife videos of seals mating? I don't care. Don't hurt seals, and I'll never bother you. But in the US, someone that thinks oddly is persecuted. For a country that prides itself on the freedom of speech and the freedom of thought that's considered even more important, there's a lot of persecution for thoughtcrimes like liking someone in "that way" that you don't approve of.
I am really curious if it thinks I'm gay (does it consider bisexuality?). Also, this could be useful as a dating tool; if you don't know if the object of your affections is gay or not, run them through MIT Gaydar, and then possibly feel more secure about asking them out.
Also, this could be useful as a dating tool; if you don't know if the object of your affections is gay or not, run them through MIT Gaydar, and then possibly feel more secure about asking them out.
Or, you know, you could just take the time to get to know someone a bit before asking them out. 'Course, you'd have to log off and go out into the real world to to that.
It's not worth it it only comes in lo-def and you only get a trial version that expires after a short period, but worst of all its closed source so you never know whats going on!
The whole topic of gay and not gay has always been interesting to me because the line of thought is alien to me. I consider myself hyper-straight in the sense that I have been sexually attracted to women since before the age of 4... I always knew I liked looking at women... I liked the way their pants fit:) just didn't actually know why until I was 8 or so. But the notion of seeing men sexually has always been fascinating to me because I stretch my mind and still cannot see it. What do women see in men? I don't know. What do men see in men? I don't know. But as a man of the U.S. I have always believed that being gay was an identity based on what you do. A recent NPR show was discussing being gay in the middle east. There they did not so much identify gay as what you do but as who you are. That's a tough thing to wrap one's mind around... identity not based on what one does. Just about every kind of identity in the U.S. seems wrapped around what one does, what one has or his position.
So given this new mind-twister, the MIT Gaydar makes assumptions based on what? I'd be interested to know. Surely it can't be based on associations alone. If all my friends were black, would that indicate that I am also black? My tendency to burn in the sunlight would tend to disagree with that. I'd be interested to know how MIT defines gay to better understand how it makes determinations.
I disagree that the US considers people gay on the basis of what they do. There are lots of counter examples of people who aren't the way they act: closet gays, bicurious, abstaining gay christians, lifestyle gays, metrosexuals, gay until graduation.
Some act gay but aren't, some explore 'alternative' sexualities but never feel that they aren't straight, some clearly self-identify as gay but don't actually have same-sex intercourse. Despite the world's efforts to put us all into convenient pigeon holes, sexuality is a complex spectrum that doesn't lend itself well to assumptions.
Yeah, someone should set up a company where people put in their interests and stuff, and it finds another member who matches then introduces them. Sounds like a possible application for them there newfangled computer doohickeys.
My Kingdom for a mod point! Not being able to ask someone out for fear of mutual embarrassment and summary rejection is surely a weighty cross to bear.
That is solved by socially accepting homosexuals, not by probing them.
My Kingdom for a mod point! Not being able to ask someone out for fear of mutual embarrassment and summary rejection is surely a weighty cross to bear.
That is solved by socially accepting homosexuals, not by probing them.
Do you think that heterosexuals don't hold back from asking people out for fear of mutual embarrassment and summary rejection?
Maybe it's because you're skinny or have acne, not much money, not socially confident etc, etc. No matter how well gays are accepted everyone still risks rejection when they ask someone out. I'm not sure that "No, I'm not gay" is more hurtful than "No, I don't like you" as a rejection. I think there is no way to make rejection more palatable. You just have to learn to deal with it, part of that being more selective who you ask.
Does it also take into account if all your friends are women? If they're all members of a musical theatre troupe? If one of your friends is your mother...
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.
...The work has not been published in a scientific journal...
I once wrote a computer program that predicted coin tosses. I didn't check, but I'm pretty sure that if I had tossed a coin that the predictions would have been accurate.
A couple friends of mine once wrote software to predict market commodities price changes. They had a huge dataset, the last 10 years worth of every commodity price. They tweaked it, and tweaked it, and tweaked it, and in the end it made a consistent profit over their entire dataset. Then they both invested $2,500 each, and it steadily lost every cent of it over less than a year.
It's easy to come up with a model that matches your data without even realizing it, this sounds like the exact same thing.
You mean if people can view your social networks on facebook they can deduce some basic facts about you? Shocking! People really need to think about the compromise that they are making when they make their FB profiles and info visible to anyone but their immediate friends. It's ok if you want to do it, but just realize what you are doing.
Being on a social network site at all exposes you a lot. I decided I didn't give a crap, but I have everything set to 'friends only' and I don't use apps or quizzes. Reasonable compromise for a non-tin-foil-hatter.
There are a couple of fields of personal data in facebook which state your marital status, and whether you are looking for a man or woman. It might just be possible from analyzing these details, which way you swing.
by Anonymous Coward
on Sunday September 20, @02:31PM (#29484409)
When I first used FB, I kept most of the personal information blank. I only told it my age, that I was male, and that I was in a relationship and not looking for one.
FB at once started serving up gay-oriented ads. I never clicked on any of them or in any other way expressed interest, yet over time the percentage of these seemed to increase.
I finally gave up, and filled in the "interested in" section. The moment that field went from blank to "women", the gay ads vanished.
It isn't clear whether FB actually thought that I was gay, or just sought to pressure me into answering more questions about myself. If the former, its algorithms are entirely too simplistic. If the latter, it's evil.
This is old news (and really pretty obvious) and have been known in the gay community since FB started:) I have ~250 friends and being gay, quite a few of my friends are gay too. Whenever I click on some new person I can usually tell whether that person is gay (at least if it's a guy) or not, simply based on the number of gay friends we have in common (i.e. I don't even need to look at that person's friends individually to see whom of them are gay). So if we don't have any friends in common at all, it's usually a sign that the person isn't gay. Now, being from a small country (Denmark, 5.5 mio. citizens) implies a smaller gay community, but I would still think this observation would be valid in other countries at least within cities.
The reason this works is of course that within all communities there are certain people who have _a lot_ of friends on Facebook and sort of serve as "magnets", in the sense that someone in the same community is likely to sooner or later run into that person and be added as a friend on Facebook - or at least run into one out of the "magnet" persons you are friends with.
There are things that make wonderful party games. Medicine cards, runes, reading body language, etc. There is really nothing wrong with these games.
The problem is when we start using these perfectly reasonable tools to begin to make real decisions. You are guilty because the runes said so. Most of us tend to believe that decisions should be made on some direct evidence, not indirect assumption. I mean it is not liek some guys think, that every girl that won't go out with them is a lesbian and every guy that hates football is gay.
There is the issue of what makes a person gay, straight, or bi. Just like sleeping with large numbers of the opposite sex does not make one straight, and may indicate a deep seated concern, there is nothing other than a self identification that can suggest a real sexual preference. I don't think a professional, or computer program, or parent can within a reasonable certainty state a sexual preference for another person. And this has nothing to do with the controversy. It has to do with weather we live by reason and evidence or by superstition and hearsay. I think the MIT people are simply too infatuated with cult of technology.
I beg to differ (Score:5, Insightful)
"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."
I have control over my information. And that is why you wont find be on Facebook.
Re:I beg to differ (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:I beg to differ (Score:5, Funny)
"And yet you registered for a slashdot account."
My social interaction is restricted to 4chan where my info will be respected.
Parent
Re:I beg to differ (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:I beg to differ (Score:5, Insightful)
But your friends know you. And they may, in fact, be posting information about you. Everything from tagging pictures to leaving notes. You have no control over this.
Parent
Re:I beg to differ (Score:5, Interesting)
But your friends know you. And they may, in fact, be posting information about you. Everything from tagging pictures to leaving notes. You have no control over this.
That's true to a point. But on some level that's not 'your information' that's others information about you. You couldn't stop your friends from outing you as gay or communist or vegetarian in the 60s and you can't today. Facebook isn't really a factor.
However, in terms of data mining and automated profiling etc its worse if you have a facebook account than if you don't. If someone tags a non-FB member its just a name attached to a photo. It doesn't really go anywhere. Its true that someone could see it or read a note mentioning you and connect it to you, or do sophisticated data mining to link all those references together and assemble a profile... but if you tag someone who is a fb member (the way they want you to) it creates a link back to that account, making it utterly TRIVIAL to connect it back to you.
I'm not on facebook. So while there may be some pictures on it with my name tagged to them, its not really any worse than the web in general. My name/photo is together in a few places online, but they aren't all linked together back to a single 'account' somewhere. If there are tagged photos of me on fb its the same, they are their but all disconnected. If you have a facebook account they'd all link back to that.
My 'privacy' isn't absolute. I don't expect it to be impossible for people find stuff about me online. But I do object strongly to stuff like facebook where a single company is handed tons of data self-documented by its own users... its idiotic that anyone would participate.
Parent
Re:I beg to differ (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:I beg to differ (Score:5, Insightful)
And people can still google it and it can still ruin your life.
Do you feel beholden to the idiots who make snap judgments of others based on indirect or second hand information? These McCarthyists with their lists of Facebook URLs have the power to ruin your life? How so? Why is it you've delegated this power to others who lack the wits to exercise considered judgment? Or is it instead the case that the photos from your personal life present you doing things that no reasonable person would do?
There's an element of chicken shit to take the anonymous court of public opinion quite so seriously. It often stems from the desire to substitute dignity with irreproachableness. Part of the deal with dignity is accepting that you can't force others to draw the right conclusions. If you take the opposite approach and try to control what people conclude about you, you'll discover one of two things: a) you're sucking up to the rich and powerful, or b) the people whose opinions you have successfully shaped have no significance. Option (a) works, if that's what you want.
I'm personally looking forward to the generation where when you look for someone on the web, and find nothing at all, you judge what that person might be hiding more seriously than you judge the ordinary defects of those who fear less to make themselves known.
Parent
Re:I beg to differ (Score:4, Insightful)
But your friends know you. And they may, in fact, be posting information about you.
Correction: People who claim to be my friends may be posting information about me. The only ones who are my friends are those that I acknowledge as such.
The world is full of people who claim to be the friend of some rich, influential or important people. That you or any others actually believe anything they have to say demonstrates your gullibility and susceptibility to scams or cons. Although this has been going on for ages, th Interweb has made this both easier and more difficult to exploit. Easier, because many people are gullible enough to believe someone when they say, "I know so and so" without checking the veracity of their claim. More difficult because the structure of some social networking sites makes it easy to verify the bidirectionality of these links. Blow hards who claim to know everyone, but are unkown, or just not acknowledged, by the other parties are easy to expose.
I value my privacy. And my true friends know this. So the more information a person posts about me in public, the less likely it is that they are a friend. And the more likely it is that the info. may be incorrect.
Parent
Re:I beg to differ (Score:4, Informative)
You can tag them, but I don't think it's searchable. Even if it were, unless your name is Zaphod Beeblibrox, chances are there are hundreds of people tagged under the same name, so it'd be rather difficult to go through them and figure out which one is you.
Parent
Re:I beg to differ (Score:5, Interesting)
"Do you actually have the slightest idea what you just said? I understand that America-bashing is fashionable these days..."
It would help if we didn't make it so easy. Like it or not, America is the gold-standard for 'sex is bad' (and 'skin = sex', therefore 'skin = bad'). Of course we inherited a goodly part of the from our English cousins, which brings us to:
"Ask Alan Turing about how tolerant Europeans can be about sexual orientation."
Alan lived and died in England, where his sexuality was illegal. I'm not sure if England considers themselves 'European' yet, but certainly most countries (not all) in continental Europe were more tolerant about sexual preference 50 years ago than most Americans today.
A.
Parent
Re:I beg to differ (Score:5, Insightful)
Too late. If it's bad, I don't care where it's worse. It's bad in the US. Go to some place like New Zealand. You'll find many straight people saying "partner" in relation to their spouse or unmarried life partner. When the terminology is such where a committed pair of gays and a committed straight couple can talk without having the words they choose reveal something about themselves, then you know you are free. The US still pushes terminology that separates gays. If they want to talk family at work, they either have to lie, or they are revealed in the first sentence. Tolerance isn't trying to pretend it doesn't matter. Tolerance is an apathy of the personal details of others. Masturbate to wildlife videos of seals mating? I don't care. Don't hurt seals, and I'll never bother you. But in the US, someone that thinks oddly is persecuted. For a country that prides itself on the freedom of speech and the freedom of thought that's considered even more important, there's a lot of persecution for thoughtcrimes like liking someone in "that way" that you don't approve of.
Parent
Re:I beg to differ (Score:5, Funny)
I just assumed you had a cold.
(And a speech-to-text interface.)
Parent
Solution (Score:4, Funny)
Friend Everyone...
Re:Solution (Score:4, Funny)
Friend Everyone...
At best that will categorise you as 'angsty teenager'.
At worst, as 'All things to all men - especially those free and easy men at MIT'.
Parent
MIT Gaydar should be Facebook app (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:MIT Gaydar should be Facebook app (Score:5, Insightful)
Or, you know, you could just take the time to get to know someone a bit before asking them out. 'Course, you'd have to log off and go out into the real world to to that.
Parent
Re:MIT Gaydar should be Facebook app (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:MIT Gaydar should be Facebook app (Score:5, Funny)
The.Real.World.S22E01.DSR.XviD-SAiNTS.avi [thepiratebay.org]
Parent
Re:MIT Gaydar should be Facebook app (Score:5, Funny)
It's not worth it it only comes in lo-def and you only get a trial version that expires after a short period, but worst of all its closed source so you never know whats going on!
Parent
Re:MIT Gaydar should be Facebook app (Score:4, Interesting)
The whole topic of gay and not gay has always been interesting to me because the line of thought is alien to me. I consider myself hyper-straight in the sense that I have been sexually attracted to women since before the age of 4... I always knew I liked looking at women... I liked the way their pants fit :) just didn't actually know why until I was 8 or so. But the notion of seeing men sexually has always been fascinating to me because I stretch my mind and still cannot see it. What do women see in men? I don't know. What do men see in men? I don't know. But as a man of the U.S. I have always believed that being gay was an identity based on what you do. A recent NPR show was discussing being gay in the middle east. There they did not so much identify gay as what you do but as who you are. That's a tough thing to wrap one's mind around... identity not based on what one does. Just about every kind of identity in the U.S. seems wrapped around what one does, what one has or his position.
So given this new mind-twister, the MIT Gaydar makes assumptions based on what? I'd be interested to know. Surely it can't be based on associations alone. If all my friends were black, would that indicate that I am also black? My tendency to burn in the sunlight would tend to disagree with that. I'd be interested to know how MIT defines gay to better understand how it makes determinations.
Parent
Re:MIT Gaydar should be Facebook app (Score:5, Insightful)
Some act gay but aren't, some explore 'alternative' sexualities but never feel that they aren't straight, some clearly self-identify as gay but don't actually have same-sex intercourse. Despite the world's efforts to put us all into convenient pigeon holes, sexuality is a complex spectrum that doesn't lend itself well to assumptions.
Parent
Re:MIT Gaydar should be Facebook app (Score:5, Insightful)
Right, because we don't have things like gender, race, or age in the US.
Anyway, sorry to disrupt the "I'm so damn straight!" fest.
Parent
Re:you are wrong. (Score:5, Insightful)
You have two concepts confused:
1) What features women say they find attractive in men
2) What features women *actually* find attractive in men
The two are not even remotely close to the same.
Parent
Re:you are wrong. (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:MIT Gaydar should be Facebook app (Score:4, Insightful)
That's not just a gay issue.. just ask any teenager (and quite a few adults)
Parent
Re:MIT Gaydar should be Facebook app (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:MIT Gaydar should be Facebook app (Score:5, Insightful)
My Kingdom for a mod point! Not being able to ask someone out for fear of mutual embarrassment and summary rejection is surely a weighty cross to bear.
That is solved by socially accepting homosexuals, not by probing them.
Parent
Re:MIT Gaydar should be Facebook app (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:MIT Gaydar should be Facebook app (Score:5, Insightful)
My Kingdom for a mod point! Not being able to ask someone out for fear of mutual embarrassment and summary rejection is surely a weighty cross to bear.
That is solved by socially accepting homosexuals, not by probing them.
Do you think that heterosexuals don't hold back from asking people out for fear of mutual embarrassment and summary rejection?
Maybe it's because you're skinny or have acne, not much money, not socially confident etc, etc. No matter how well gays are accepted everyone still risks rejection when they ask someone out. I'm not sure that "No, I'm not gay" is more hurtful than "No, I don't like you" as a rejection. I think there is no way to make rejection more palatable. You just have to learn to deal with it, part of that being more selective who you ask.
Parent
Re:MIT Gaydar should be Facebook app (Score:5, Funny)
It was probably a surprise when it went in too.
Parent
Re:MIT Gaydar should be Facebook app (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:MIT Gaydar should be Facebook app (Score:5, Funny)
Or whether your last session originated from a Mac or not? And how about if you talk about, or have pictures of, Mazda Miatas in your profile?
Parent
Well, that seems cut & dried... (Score:5, Insightful)
From the article:
I once wrote a computer program that predicted coin tosses. I didn't check, but I'm pretty sure that if I had tossed a coin that the predictions would have been accurate.
Re:Well, that seems cut & dried... (Score:5, Informative)
Also according to the article, they ran it against 10 friends who they know to be gay but who aren't "out" on Facebook. It hit 100%.
Too small a sample to be sure, but still significant.
The whole thing just boils down to "people who are ____ tend to have friends who are also ____.
Insert gay, straight, Christian, Moslem, male, female, old, young, black, white, whatever.
Parent
Re:Well, that seems cut & dried... (Score:5, Interesting)
A couple friends of mine once wrote software to predict market commodities price changes. They had a huge dataset, the last 10 years worth of every commodity price. They tweaked it, and tweaked it, and tweaked it, and in the end it made a consistent profit over their entire dataset. Then they both invested $2,500 each, and it steadily lost every cent of it over less than a year.
It's easy to come up with a model that matches your data without even realizing it, this sounds like the exact same thing.
Parent
Incomplete headline (Score:5, Insightful)
in the latest issue of DUH.... (Score:4, Insightful)
You mean if people can view your social networks on facebook they can deduce some basic facts about you? Shocking! People really need to think about the compromise that they are making when they make their FB profiles and info visible to anyone but their immediate friends. It's ok if you want to do it, but just realize what you are doing.
Being on a social network site at all exposes you a lot. I decided I didn't give a crap, but I have everything set to 'friends only' and I don't use apps or quizzes. Reasonable compromise for a non-tin-foil-hatter.
I'm still safe... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I'm still safe... (Score:4, Insightful)
With a username like "celibate for life", they don't really have to invent anything to tell you're a virgin.
Parent
Re:I'm still safe... (Score:5, Funny)
If you're posting on Slashdot you've already been outed.
Parent
It's simple really... (Score:5, Funny)
There are a couple of fields of personal data in facebook which state your marital status, and whether you are looking for a man or woman. It might just be possible from analyzing these details, which way you swing.
I buy my gaydar... (Score:4, Funny)
FB's datamining for ads works the same way (Score:5, Informative)
When I first used FB, I kept most of the personal information blank. I only told it my age, that I was male, and that I was in a relationship and not looking for one.
FB at once started serving up gay-oriented ads. I never clicked on any of them or in any other way expressed interest, yet over time the percentage of these seemed to increase.
I finally gave up, and filled in the "interested in" section. The moment that field went from blank to "women", the gay ads vanished.
It isn't clear whether FB actually thought that I was gay, or just sought to pressure me into answering more questions about myself. If the former, its algorithms are entirely too simplistic. If the latter, it's evil.
Re:FB's datamining for ads works the same way (Score:4, Insightful)
Have you considered that the algorithm might just be
a) "If user is hetero show ads from companies that want to reach hetero males"
b) "If user is gay show ads from companies that want to reach gay males"
c) "If unsure show both"
with your area, at the time, having no businesses that wanted to reach people through facebook?
I know I've yet to see a titty bar advertise on FB, and you had excluded the dating sites by saying you were in a relationship.
Parent
Old news (Score:5, Interesting)
Party games (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is when we start using these perfectly reasonable tools to begin to make real decisions. You are guilty because the runes said so. Most of us tend to believe that decisions should be made on some direct evidence, not indirect assumption. I mean it is not liek some guys think, that every girl that won't go out with them is a lesbian and every guy that hates football is gay.
There is the issue of what makes a person gay, straight, or bi. Just like sleeping with large numbers of the opposite sex does not make one straight, and may indicate a deep seated concern, there is nothing other than a self identification that can suggest a real sexual preference. I don't think a professional, or computer program, or parent can within a reasonable certainty state a sexual preference for another person. And this has nothing to do with the controversy. It has to do with weather we live by reason and evidence or by superstition and hearsay. I think the MIT people are simply too infatuated with cult of technology.
Re:Party games (Score:5, Funny)
Just like sleeping with large numbers of the same sex does not make one gay
fixed that for you
--Ted Haggard
Parent
Confirming sayings (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not exactly rocket surgery! (Score:5, Insightful)
Likewise, if twenty-five of your thirty Facebook friends are gay and of the opposite gender as you, they conclude you're probably single.
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