On Social Networks, You Are Who You Know 171
santosh maharshi writes "On social networks like Facebook, even if you have kept your profile very private, people can just look at your friends list and infer lots of vital information about you. Most of the social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn allow people to see your picture and your friends list as part of the open access for visitors (the article says that only 5% of Facebook users have bothered to hide their friends list). In a study titled You Are Who You Know: Inferring User Profiles in Online Social Networks (PDF), conducted by Alan Mislove of Northeastern University and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, an algorithm was tested that can accurately infer the personal attributes of Facebook users simply by looking at their friend lists. 'At Rice [University], the algorithm accurately predicted the correct dormitory, graduation year, and area of study for the many of the students. In fact, among these undergraduates, researchers found that “with as little as 20 percent of the users providing attributes we can often infer the attributes for the remaining users with over 80 percent accuracy."'"
Re:You have friends (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the point of this is that you shouldn't be showing public searchers your friend lists under any circumstances--especially Facebook.
Although for me most of the people on Facebook that I am "friends" with are people I knew in college. That doesn't necessarily mean we shared like interests, lived together or even were close. They added me and I wasn't so revolted by their existence that I said, "meh," and approved it.
As far as Twitter goes...most of the people that I follow on there are trimmed frequently. I go through and drop off the people I don't care for. I do a lot of water testing. Most of the people I do happen to follow I have never met in person nor do I plan to. I just happen to find what they say interesting whether I agree with it or not.
I guess I'm one of those people that causes this to go down to 80%.
OK, and? (Score:3, Insightful)
The things they found out aren't things most people have any reason to keep secret. OK, if you see that most of my Facebook friends went to Cowpie High or Mediocre State University, and you'll realize that I, too, probably went to Cowpie High and Mediocre State. So what? Mediocre State is on my (sometimes publicly available) resume, and it's not like its any secret that I went to Cowpie High either. (and yes, the school's actual nickname among the students was that)
Much more interesting would be if they could figure things which people are trying to keep private. Where they buried the bodies of their "missing" parents, if they're gay but in the closet (I think there already was an article about that over a year ago, though), membership in the Secret Order of Inquisitors and Torturers (friending Dick Cheney is the giveaway here), etc.
Re:You have friends (Score:5, Insightful)
Guess I'm nobody, since I have no facebook account LOL
But yeah, people shouldn't be surprised that publicly documenting every facet of your life results in less privacy, for you, and for everyone you know.
It could go a lot deeper (Score:4, Insightful)
While the study proves a fairly obvious hypothesis, what your social network could say about you could go a lot deeper than that. It's not much of a leap to determine religion, politics, sexual orientation or various other things that people don't fully consider, or could even be used to violate equal opportunity housing or hiring laws. I think there are a lot of great things about social networking, and facebook in particular, but the how it's changing cultural views and expectations of privacy is shocking and fast, and I don't think we'll have perspective on whats happening for years to come.
Re:OK, and? (Score:2, Insightful)
Way to Go, slashdot readers! Completely overgeneralizing a research article!
The point is that it doesn't even have to be "most" of your Facebook friends. You can infer a surprising amount of information based on a relatively small sampling of people. This is not as obvious as it sounds. The proper extension is that this type of research indicates it's possible to infer other information (like shopping, political, geographic, demographic, etc) from information reflected by your friends. If it really is that obvious, why doesn't everybody already do it effectively? It's because it's not easy and not at all obvious. Facebook and Google have some impressive algorithms for this type of thing but nothing systematic and not as quantified as anybody might think.
You'd think people would welcome fundamental research into an obviously useful area. Sheesh
i'm not on facebook (Score:3, Insightful)
it seems like a giant ego bonfire, it seems like a massive waste of time to tweak minor pointless trivia about your social life. just the very thought of it fills me with tedium and exhaustion. it seems to reinforce the worst aspects of people's personalities: their vanity, their shallowness, and their mediocrity. i mean who really fucking cares, including yourself, about this running narrative about the pointless banalities of your life?
and now i find the someone, in fact, does care: the demons of id theft and invasion of privacy and spam marketing... as invited into your life, by your own vanity
do the best thing you can ever do for yourself: lose facebook. don't go to another social networking site, just simply drop completely off the radar of this fad whose only value is to reinforce and amplify the worst parts of your personality, and to turn you into fodder to be harvested by search spiders and marketing algorithms
you've offered your life up to harvesting by a depersonalizing machine. grow some character by becoming real, and lose the ridiculous mask called facebook. if the lunch meat called spam became the catchword for depersonalized email message, i'd like to offer that social networking be known as soylent green: it's people! social networking sites like facebook are everyday people, ground up, processed and extruded into depersonalized marketing diarrhea: soylent green
why would you do that to yourself? teenagers: you are exempt, its a useful tool for social exploration. anyone older than 24: you're pathetic
Re:i'm not on facebook (Score:3, Insightful)
it seems like a giant ego bonfire, it seems like a massive waste of time to tweak minor pointless trivia about your social life. just the very thought of it fills me with tedium and exhaustion. it seems to reinforce the worst aspects of people's personalities: their vanity, their shallowness, and their mediocrity. i mean who really fucking cares, including yourself, about this running narrative about the pointless banalities of your life?
yada yada yada...
If you're so bothered by it, why are you wasting so much time ranting about it here? Simply ignore and move on... Oh, I see, it is we, the ones with the giant egos that need to listen to YOUR viewpoint. Hypocrite.
I'll grant you a lot of the crap on social networking sites is indeed ego fanning, but I'll also counter with the fact that it makes keeping in touch with distant family and friends almost trivially easy, which can strengthen relationship bonds, and that's generally a good thing.
Re:You have friends (Score:2, Insightful)
I'd say it would be better to simply avoid Facebook, Twitter et cetera altogether. No matter how careful you are with your privacy settings (assuming Facebook can be trusted), unless you are meticulous about not posting anything that you would not say ANYWHERE else, sooner or later it's likely that you will run into some embarassment or another.
I have several friends who have suffered some form of discombobulation because their allusions to defects in the character of acquaintances have been made manifest through the friends-of-friends network.
Enough for me. I'll just stay off-grid.