
Project ‘Gaydar’: An MIT experiment raises new questions about online privacy - robg
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/09/20/project_gaydar_an_mit_experiment_raises_new_questions_about_online_privacy/?page=full
======
patio11
This is perhaps less impressive than you would think. Watch some mathematical
slight of hand: suppose for the sake of argument that 1% of Facebook has Dark
Secret X and you have a DSXdar program which is 99% accurate.

Your program will, out of a sample of 100,000 Facebookers, identify 1,980
people as being DSX. Half of them (99% of 1,000 = 990) have DSX. Half of them
(1% of 99,000 = 990) are not actually DSX.

The math is much more favorable for oracle programs which look for traits
which are evenly split in the population. This is one reason why "An AI which
reads your work and guesses your gender" works so amazingly well as a tech
demo. (That program exists, incidentally, and is better than 80% accurate.)
However, even supposing there were sufficient cues in a person's writing to
tell whether they were e.g. left handed or not in the same fashion, a similar
Oracle Of Lefties would be almost useless because you'd get too many
misclassified righties in with your identified lefties.

On a related note, this is why a) you are not particularly recommended to get
an HIV test if you're not at risk for AIDS and b) the first thing that will
happen after an HIV+ result is scheduling another test.

On a totally different note, much of the worries of privacy experts with
regards to Gaydar and similar programs _don't require the AI to be functional_
to come to pass. "My sophisticated computer analysis says you're 83% likely to
be a child molester." If you're already under suspicion, folks will not
ordinarily say "Wait a second, lets see the study showing that this, in fact,
actually works." They'll simply take the "expert"'s word at face value.

(See, for example, computer models of global warming. The big black box will
spit out any answer you want from it -- want the answer that global warming is
no problem at all? Turn off the "Assume that water vapor evaporation causes a
vicious warming cycle" and, bam, you can crank your smokestack slider to the
max and not have any problems. Yet folks don't routinely consider that prior
to saying that "Global warming is a fact -- the UN reported that the
scientists proved it.")

~~~
DaniFong
To be clear, there's no checkbox associated with water vapor causing a runaway
warming cycle. The ipcc radiative forcing metric pegs the contribution at less
than 5% of the total positive warming, and cloud alebedo effect, spurred on by
the increased humidity, is more strongly negative. The largest anthropogenic
contributors are still greenhouse gases, directly.

~~~
tezza
The IPCC features 4 feedback scenarios, and 6 original scenarios which are
'equally-likely', and the discussion is always around the worst case of them.

6 models ::

[http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_sr/?src=/climate...](http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_sr/?src=/climate/ipcc/emission/150.htm)

[http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_sr/?src=/climate...](http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_sr/?src=/climate/ipcc/emission/146.htm)

4 Economic Response Models ::

<http://www.lenntech.com/greenhouse-effect/ipcc-scenarios.htm>

[http://www.lenntech.com/greenhouse-effect/ipcc-sres-
scenario...](http://www.lenntech.com/greenhouse-effect/ipcc-sres-scenarios-
consequences.htm)

------
noonespecial
_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._

Gay people have _gay friends_? Brilliant! Or did they mean the gender and
_sex_ of a persons friends. There's a big fat whopping difference here. One is
much more impressive than the other.

~~~
philwelch
Gender and sex are the same 99+% of the time. The rest of the time, it's
impossible to tell from Facebook alone. It's not like Facebook has an "I'm a
transsexual" checkbox on your profile.

Identifying a closeted gay person from the proportion of openly gay friends
they have is indeed an obvious approach. The surprise is how well it works.

~~~
pwmanagerdied
He's not distinguishing gender and sex, he's distinguishing gender and
_sexuality_ , meaning sexual orientation.

~~~
philwelch
Yes, that _was_ my point. Were you intending to respond to noonespecial?

------
prat
>they used their private knowledge of 10 people in the network who were gay
but did not declare it on their Facebook page as a simple check. They found
all 10 people were predicted to be gay by the program.

Does the author care to give a false positive error rate? how many were
predicted gay and were not. without that statistic this argument is bogus.

------
Manfred
_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._

So basically they didn't prove anything, they have anecdotal evidence.

~~~
KirinDave
And a healthy dose of selective memory and bias, let's not forget.

It's depressing that this is news. Also mews: my friend thinks people who
drink Coors are gay and may not realize it yet. Why not, right? It's just as
testable as this nonsense story is.

------
jgrahamc
Hmm. No paper to be found on the web; no actual data in the article (apart
from the totally bogus 'we checked 10 gay people and they were all marked as
gay' analysis); no false negative or false positive data.

Absolutely no way to evaluate whether this has any value whatsoever.

------
blhack
I am so sick to death about these constant "privacy concerns".

If you have some deep dark secret that you don't want the world to know, then
don't go around posting it on a system that bills itself as a way of providing
ubiquitous access to everything posted to it!

These people who get concerned about privacy are the digital equivalent of
somebody posting a billboard with their contact information, then claiming a
violation of their privacy when people use that to contact them!

You posted it online. On a public forum. You cannot expect even a modicum of
privacy when you do that. If you have a problem with people reading what you
write, don't write it!

~~~
whughes
These are things that people _aren't posting_ , though. This program doesn't
look at a field on people's profiles which states their sexuality. It guesses
from the information which they make available. You may well conceal the
information you want to keep hidden, but then the information you post as
public lets people make inferences.

------
teuobk
This would have been more impressive if the authors had used other profile
data to infer sexual preference.

As an example, consider those Facebook profiles that are relatively complete
yet leave the "interested in" field blank. People not inclined to advertise
their homosexuality might feel compelled to be honest and leave the field
blank as opposed to outing themselves or posting a lie. Thus, one might infer
that a person with a conspicuously absent "interested in" preference is
actually gay. (Of course, there's also the chance that the profile owner
simply feels that the idea of the "interested in" field seems a bit juvenile,
so this particular example might be misleading.)

------
psyklic
I can attest that it is very easy to identify who is gay on Facebook, even if
their profile does not say so. If you have a lot of gay friends, then Facebook
tells you how many mutual friends you have with new people. If you know the
mutual friends are gay, then it is likely that the unknown person is also gay.
Very easy, so I'm not surprised.

------
naveensundar
Not even wrong.

