Gay Men "Can be Outed by Their Facebook Profiles"

The UK's Pink News has a story that is very relevant in homophobic states like Virginia where gays can be fired at will by employers because of their sexual orientation. The story is that by analyzing one's Facebook profile - particularly your friends - it can be determined whether or not you are gay. Or so say two students, Carter Jernigan and Behram Mistree, from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who developed software which looked at the gender and sexuality of a person's Facebook friends. It then used statistical analysis to make a prediction of someone's sexuality. Based on a small control group, the predictions were 100% accurate. In this area, it is precisely the type of thing that zealous homophobes in the military would use to out gays in the military notwithstanding the "Don't Ask" portion of DADT. Here are some story highlights:

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Gay men can be outed by looking at their Facebook friends, a study has found. According to researchers, the information can be found despite discretion and privacy settings. Although many people set their profiles to private, they usually do not hide their friend lists and researchers say it is their friends' profiles which can reveal personal data such as sexuality.

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They developed software which looked at the gender and sexuality of a person's Facebook friends. It then used statistical analysis to make a prediction of someone's sexuality. Although Jernigan and Mistree could not ascertain the sexuality of all the men they surveyed, the programme gave 100 per cent correct results for a small control group. However, it did not work on lesbians or bisexual people of either gender.

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The study has not been published in any academic journal but has raised interesting questions about privacy and discretion on the web. Kevin Bankston, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco nonprofit digital rights group, told the Boston Globe: “Even if you don’t affirmatively post revealing information, simply publishing your friends’ list may reveal sensitive information about you, or it may lead people to make assumptions about you that are incorrect.

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Again, I can only ponder when Congress and state legislatures will get off their ass and pass laws to stop religious based discrimination against LGBT citizens. Both the military and employers should be looking at job performance and competence, not who one falls in love with or sleeps with in the non-work hours.