• Boston Globe, et al, Monday, September 21, 2009 2 PM

Perhaps we're too busy marveling at all the technological and creative innovations reshaping digital communications, but, for our money, the related issue of personal privacy doesn't get the front-page coverage it often deserves. New research from two MIT students could change that. Forget about salacious photos or social networkers' revealing profile info. Just the basic currency of interactions on social networks -- "friending" -- has the potential of revealing too much, they found.

Just by looking at a person's online Facebook friends, they found they could predict whether the person was gay. They did this with a software program that looked at the gender and sexuality of a person's friends and, using statistical analysis, made a prediction. Based solely on their own knowledge outside the Facebook world, their computer program appeared quite accurate for men, they said. People may be effectively "outing" themselves just by the virtual company they keep.

The project, dubbed "Gaydar," is part of the fast-evolving field of social network analysis, which examines what the connections between people can tell us. The applications vary from predicting who might be a terrorist to the likelihood a person is happy or fat. The idea of making assumptions about people by looking at their relationships is apparently not new, but the sudden availability of information online means the field's powerful tools can now be applied to just about anyone.

"With the service being used to catch tax evaders, in addition to a conspiracy theory citing CIA ties, it'll be interesting to see how the public reacts to this latest show of Facebook data mining capabilities," ReadWriteWeb posits. " While it's unlikely that terrorist suspects are friending each other on Facebook, there are a number of associations that need not be publicized to corporate partners or governments.

Tim Finin, a Professor in the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department at UMBC, the University of Maryland Baltimore County, meanwhile, believes that social networks, and Facebook in particular, isn't being given enough credit here. "I suspect that many will read the article and think that such an analysis can be easily done on their own Facebook information," he writes. "While I'm not a Facebook expert, I assume that the vast majority of its users employ the default privacy settings which do not allow non-friends to see personal information including gender and the 'interested in' attribute, which can be used as a proxy for sexual orientation."

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