Two students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have created a piece of software that can reportedly guess if someone is gay based solely on their Facebook profile.
The project, first reported by The Boston Globe, analyses a person’s Facebook friends and uses that data to decide if they’re gay or not. When tested on ten men, known to be gay but not publishing the information on their Facebook profile, the software correctly guessed the sexual preferences of all ten.
The software has only had small-scale testing at present and according to The Telegraph is apparently not so hot at identifying lesbians and bisexual people. Still, if the technique can be honed into something more reliable we may be looking at a rather frightening future.
There is a wide variety of details we might want to keep secret about ourselves for perfectly legitimate reasons. Imagine if a computer program could be run to identify more than just our sexual preferences but our political beliefs and where we live. As The Boston Globe article notes, research of this type has already been conduct with some success.
As we make our way around the web we generate a lot of data about ourselves deliberately; photos, videos, profiles and the like. When that’s combined with the data we don’t even think about much of the time, such as who we accept as friends, we’re creating a lot of data that could be used against us in the future.
Results from these types of studies may never be 100% accurate but if they reach a decent level of reliability they could be used by governments to weed out potential troublemakers, militants to identify potential targets and much more. Think about the number of people falsely identified as terrorists post-9/11 or the people incorrectly hounded as paedophiles.
These types of analytical programs could lead us down some worrying roads in the future if people place too much faith in them.
The false identification is probably more of a concern to most, than anything else.
After all, to believe is to ultimately stand by, not shy away from. But to be identified as being something you’re not presents a far greater peril.
This seems to be not very scientific for several reasons.
- “When tested on ten men, known to be gay” – Isn’t this observer bias?
- “is apparently not so hot at identifying lesbians and bisexual people” – So the software can’t tell whether “someone” is gay but rather is a man is gay. Big difference. And, apparently, it really only works on men who were already known to the researchers to be gay.
- Finally, the first time this is attempted to be applied to a wider group and it incorrectly identifies someone, it will lose all credibility. From then on, anyone marked as gay by the software can say “Well it also misidentified such-and-such, so you can’t trust it.”
facebook keeps shooting itself in the foot by adding dumb features. this is the reason people are leaving facebook. that new network knoyce.com is better than myspace and soon gaining on facebook too
I will be very, very scared if one day these kind of stuff will regulate our life. Destroying the freedom of people…..
Of course facebook basically does for free what police departments used to have red squads for. It would be pretty easy, in a time of crisis, for the state/ dictator/ coup plotters to go friend to friend and round up pretty much anyone whose a political radical. Slightly less apocalypticly … imagine how many more people would have lost their jobs for “questionable” loyalties if facebook had preceded the McCarthyite area.
The real question is whether or not the immediate agitational and propagandistic political benefits of having an active social / political presence, online or otherwise, out way the potential long term ones of getting your head chopped off for thoughtcrime. Well I think they do.
Without a greater dissemination of information that counteracts the lies and militarism of the “official” Corporate news outlets- and without people being able to crawl out of their own atomization and re-discover such subversive concepts as communitiy and solidarity- I don’t think we as a species would have any hope at all.
I’d rather take my chances in a thermonuclear war than in a world where I can’t write or speak a word without first looking over my shoulder.
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Matt, in my opinion you completely missed the point. The importance of this story is not in whether this particular piece of software is actually able to correctly classify gay and straight men, but rather in the frightening idea that people develop this kind of software and that eventually companies, governments and individuals will be able to use it.
Based on the arguments you have pointed out I would indeed agree that this particular application is not very worthy of mention (yet). But it will be probably be improved and similar software will be developed. That’s the thing to worry about.
I see what you’re saying, but I don’t think software that can uncover & predict personal details about people based on information they’ve put online (in this case, who they have chosen to be friends with on Facebook) is a new concept.
This behavioral analysis is how Google, Amazon and many others make money through advertising. And their systems are far more sophisticated than this and have been around for years.
What makes this case seem new, and why it’s getting so much press, is because sexual orientation isn’t something we’ve heard about this technology being used for before. And it’s probably being given some extra weight in news/social media circles because it came out of MIT.