
Facebook knows you’re gay before you do - followmylee
http://americablog.com/2013/03/facebook-might-know-youre-gay-before-you-do.html
======
argonaut
I wonder if anyone here has actually tried running a Facebook ad campaign and
has seen the results? I have, and Facebook is not nearly as sophisticated as
this article and many commenters are making it out to be.

The article makes a claim with a very unsubstantiated sense of certitude:

> Matt’s two comments, along with other data points ... led Facebook to
> estimate that if you lined a hundred people with characteristics identical
> to Matt’s, a significant number of them will be closeted gays

 _At best_ , the article can state Facebook _might_ have estimated that Matt
was a closeted gay. _I seriously doubt that._ Facebook (on the ad manager)
only estimates that 14 million people are interested in the "Gay" topic. And
it only estimates that 4 million are interested in the LGBT topic. Looking at
those numbers, those figures are probably drawn off like pages. Even if
Facebook were trying to sneakily indirectly profile everyone, they're doing a
bad job of it.

The more likely explanation is that this is a coincidence due to someone
targeting their ads at people interested in liberal politics (which Facebook
would know from liking a politician).

The paranoid, Occams-razor-butchering explanation is the one the article
gives.

I'd wager that for every closeted gay that was targeted this ad, 50 other not
closeted-gays saw this ad and thought it was weird and then moved on.

------
networked
What I wonder is, what kind of attitude will people who grow up with those
kinds of analytics have towards them?

A little while ago in a conversation about privacy an acquaintance told me
that he feels good about the fact there is someone or something out there that
cares about his interests, even if it's Google [1]. Thinking back to this
brings up in my mind the conversation with the AI Morpheus in Deus Ex [2];
looks like it is still a tossup whether it will turn out to have been
prescient. I don't consider data mining to be inherently unethical but I'm not
sure what to think of this.

[1] To put this in context, at the time the person in question also reported
feeling depressed and lonely.

[2] <https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Deus_Ex#Morpheus_2>

I'll quote the juiciest part:

 _"Morpheus: Human beings feel pleasure when they are watched. I have recorded
their smiles as I tell them who they are.

JC Denton: Some people just don't understand the dangers of indiscriminate
surveillance.

Morpheus: The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God.
Now we can implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms.

JC Denton: Electronic surveillance hardly inspires reverence. Perhaps fear and
obedience, but not reverence.

Morpheus: God and the gods were apparitions of observation, judgment and
punishment. Other sentiments towards them were secondary.

JC Denton: No one will ever worship a software entity peering at them through
a camera.

Morpheus: The human organism always worships. First, it was the gods, then it
was fame (the observation and judgment of others), next it will be self-aware
systems you have built to realize truly omnipresent observation and judgment.

JC Denton: You underestimate humankind's love of freedom.

Morpheus: The individual desires judgment. Without that desire, the cohesion
of groups is impossible, and so is civilization."_

~~~
eli_gottlieb
Someone really needs to tell fiction-writers that "Contemplate the
inevitable/eternal" tropes have gotten very, very old. I can't speak for all
readers, but I for one have stopped seeing these conversations as any kind of
serious thematic debate and started just waiting for the hero to punch Mr. Zen
Cleverdick in the face.

Perhaps a Herbert reference is appropriate. "The most fundamental principles
of the universe are accident and error."

------
TDL
I remember a while back that Target had to back of a similar approach when it
began sending out coupons to women that they suspected (w/ apparently a high
degree of accuracy) were pregnant. The main anecdote was about a father who
found out his daughter was pregnant because they started to receive the
coupons. Target eventually backed off this approach (at least for newly
pregnant women) because many of their customers complained that the marketing
campaign was creepy.

~~~
amirmc
I don't think they _stopped_ it. Just adjusted it so the offers we're
alongside random stuff (eg discounts on lawn mowers). That way people wouldn't
freak out (presumably because they didn't know how much the company really
knew about them)

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-
habits.h...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html)

Edit: Worth posting the whole quote (just found it).

“With the pregnancy products, though, we learned that some women react badly,”
the executive said. “Then we started mixing in all these ads for things we
knew pregnant women would never buy, so the baby ads looked random. We’d put
an ad for a lawn mower next to diapers. We’d put a coupon for wineglasses next
to infant clothes. That way, it looked like all the products were chosen by
chance.

“And we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn’t been
spied on, she’ll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her
block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don’t spook
her, it works.”

~~~
Evbn
Offering alcohol to someone you know is pregnant, ugh.

~~~
mattstreet
You do know that the medical profession has figured out a small amount of
alcohol (a drink or so) after the first trimester isn't a problem, right?

~~~
moe
Bullshit.

~~~
rayiner
Studies have not been able to show negative effects from moderate drinking in
pregnancy. The medical community tells women not to drink because they have
not been able to show that any level of drinking is "safe".

[http://palatepress.com/2012/02/wine/light-drinking-during-
pr...](http://palatepress.com/2012/02/wine/light-drinking-during-pregnancy-
what-recent-studies-do-and-do-not-tell-us/)

The medical profession is positively paleolithic and incredibly patriarchal
when it comes to pregnancy. There is no rational sense of weighing risks by
probability, instead it's a "you can never be too safe!" attitude. My wife
researched this issue heavily during pregnancy, and what really ground her
gears were all the people who say "the safest option is to just not drink at
all." But the fact of the matter is that these same people continued to engage
in incredibly risky behavior like the wife continuing to drive during
pregnancy.

~~~
baak
Inconclusive either way is different from 'shown drinking isn't a problem'. So
technically, he's right, even if a little too aggressive about it.

------
BenoitEssiambre
This is a bit creepy but it is the kind of thing that could be guessed from
facebook activity so it is kind of to be expected.

Lately I've been seeing ads that correlate with things that happen to me
completely outside Facebook. About things on sites I only access through
google for example. I find this more disturbing.

I checked the "Block third-party cookies and site data" in Chrome so they
shouldn't be able to track my web browsing through ads. I'm not sure where
they get their info.

For example, last week I bought a new kind of barbecue sauce at the grocery
store and the next day Facebook was asking me to like the specific brand's
page. It made me wonder. Are banks funnelling purchase information to
Facebook?

I never researched this sauce online although I had looked up recipes on how
to make homemade sauce through google. But facebook seemed to know the
specific brand I had bought.

A similar thing happened to me when I bought replacement windshield wipers for
my car a few months ago. I don't know, maybe facebook was just following the
weather and knowing that there had been a lot of wiper destroying freezing
rain at the time, was suggesting liking major wiper sellers to everybody
around here but I still found it suspicious. I had not looked up any wipers
online or mentioned that I needed some anywhere and the ad showed up just
after my purchase. I know this is all very unscientific. Anybody else have
similar experiences?

~~~
pidge
Another hypothesis is that Facebook had been showing you the barbeque sauce ad
all along, which is why you bought it. You only noticed afterwards.

~~~
brianpan
Or more likely to me, the barbecue sauce company recently launched a marketing
campaign that influenced you to buy one (and the campaign is continuing on
Facebook where you see it now).

------
jonathanjaeger
Don't assume everything is pure science and not just mere coincidence.
Facebook sometimes gives me military related ads that specifically call out
military people -- let's assume the marketer knows enough to put some sort of
targeting on their ads, then why would I be getting those ads? There are too
many variables at play to know. Also, I've seen some bugs where people get ads
specific to one location even though their IP address and their stated
location on their profile is something completely different. We could chalk
this up to coincidence or maybe there was enough data on his profile to assume
Matt is gay. At the same time, I don't think it's creepy because the
advertisers don't see the names/identities of the people they target on
Facebook, so the ads are still private until the user actually signs up for a
product or service.

~~~
Amadou
100% accuracy is never going to be possible. In fact I wouldn't be surprised
to see a price structure for targeted advertisements based on confidence
intervals.

~~~
jonathanjaeger
Of course. So when someone posts an article with anecdotal evidence towards
the way Facebook uses data, we can assume it might be true in thousands of
other cases or tens of millions of cases. It's hard to know which though.

A different pricing structure would be interesting to see sometime in the
future.

~~~
nsomniact
I made a point earlier that the advertiser chooses the target audience and I
don't believe FB does what this article claims. I've seen retargeting creep
into FB lately but again someone is making assertions rather than an algorithm
IMO. Some 3rd party ad networks let you really drill down.

I think FB can do what this article claims but is not actually doing it.

~~~
Amadou
I can't say what FB did here with much confidence - its an anecodte. But I'd
like to point out that it isn't hard to reverse engineer the information out
of FB. Buy a targeted ad and then watch the click-throughs. Cross reference
the click-throughs from that ad with data from another tracker that knows
identities and you've now been able to link whatever your FB ad criteria was
to the identities of anyone who clicks through - even if they don't do
anything else besides click through.

------
commanda
The article title is inaccurate - "Matt" did know he was gay, he just wasn't
out yet. Facebook's ad platform didn't figure it out before he did. Just as in
the Target story, the young woman knew she was pregnant, she just hadn't told
her father.

The fear mongering is a little high in this article. However, we should stop
and think: why is it so scary for others to potentially know that we're gay?
Or pregnant? Neither of these is a shameful state.

~~~
a_c_s
Nothing wrong with being gay/lgbt. But in many states in the US you can
legally be fired or denied housing on the basis of being lgbt.

~~~
camus
really ? i thought USA was the land of the free ...

~~~
jrockway
The law hasn't caught up to today's social standards quite yet. Just like you
can fire someone because you don't like how they dress, you can fire someone
for being gay, as choice in clothes and sexual orientation aren't "protected
classes":

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class>

------
grappler
My money is on the facebook widgets embedded in other sites this guy visits.
Like buttons, login buttons, perhaps a comment widget or three.

Many users may not realize that you don't need to actually click these widgets
in order to be recorded by them. Unless you're using a blocker (e.g. Ghostery
or DoNotTrackMe), your browser is pinging facebook every time they're included
on a page.

Visit a few gay porn sites that have those widgets embedded and facebook can
make a pretty educated guess you're gay.

Do porn sites not embed these things? Ok, how about any number of LGBTQ blogs,
news sites, advocacy sites, or even sites that just show things that appeal
slightly more to a gay audience than average, such as men's fashion or disney
showtunes.

------
trotsky
Can you imagine what's going to happen the first time we have presidential
candidates that have clickstreams stored from back when they were twelve?

That's going to be some powerful lobbying mojo - certainly more powerful than
anyone's privacy policy.

------
dannyr
Another thing that Facebook is doing is running a background service on your
phone to track your location.

I went to a restaurant. Didn't open the Facebook app while I was there. When I
accessed Facebook on my desktop, the first thing it showed me was an ad to
like that restaurant.

------
summerdown2
This is very interesting, particularly because this capability exists without
people knowing the little clues they leave can be put together in this way.

The EU data protection act contains the concept of sensitive personal data
thanks to the abuse of people by the Nazis. It includes ethnic origin,
religion, medical information and sexuality.

The idea is that once you can put together a list of people meeting a
particular criteria it's very easy to round them up. While I don't think
Facebook or the US are in danger of that kind of excess, neither was Holland
before the second world war. Yet one of the reasons for the high death toll of
Dutch Jews was the good state of the records:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Netherlands_(193...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Netherlands_\(1939%E2%80%931945\)#High_Jewish_death_toll)

I think it might be a good idea for Facebook and others to consider not just
the data they have but also the inferences that can be drawn on it, and
reflect whether that leaves them with certain responsibilities like easy opt
out or not storing certain things.

------
sergiotapia
This is amazing and creepy at the same time. It's no wonder Data Scientist is
one of the highest paying jobs in tech right now.

Facebook (and other similarly sized companies) have petabytes of data - what
can they do with it? Imagine!

------
mcphilip
Considering how many adult websites are adding social features (i.e. Like
buttons), I assume 'Big Data' already has much more accurate information on a
person's sexual interests than most people realize.

------
homosaur
You should be running Ghostery and NoScript/ScriptSafe with JS turned off be
default. It's your Internet condom from viruses and advertisers. Like a
condom, not 100% effective but you shouldn't concern yourself with edge cases.
People can still track you many other ways, but the point is right now they
DON'T, so this will keep you pretty safe from this for now. I have any and all
domains owned by Facebook and any other social networks I don't use blocked at
the router.

Obviously, in reading the article, the primary problem here is that he's a
Facebook user, so no amount of protection would help. You can't really use
Facebook safely.

------
ballstothewalls
call me naive, but it has been my impression that Facebook ads are never that
sophisticated. He liked a gay-friendly post and then he got served a gay-
friendly ad that happened to be about coming out.

~~~
notahacker
To put things into perspective, I told Facebook seven or eight years ago that
I _was_ gay and it hasn't stopped serving heterosexually-oriented dating ads
in the mix ever since, presumably because a filter on "male NOT currently in a
relationship" is close enough...

------
lazyjones
How facetious to post such an article on a web page that, upon scrolling to
the end, will recommend to me an article about deadly meningitis hitting gay
men in NYC ...

------
ErrantX
Even worse is the "Why not try X, your friend Y is."

This was especially fun in my case when, under the heading "You might like" I
had: "<girlfriends name> just signed up on <dating site>". :)

I don't entirely mind them profiling me based on what I _choose_ to put on
Facebook. But leaking it to my friends is weird.

(I know you can restrict the audience for everything you do, and I actively do
this, but it is soooo easy to slip up).

------
loceng
Can they predict how long before I finally am off the Facebook platform?

~~~
msabalau
Almost certainly. I wonder what their churn management interventions are.

~~~
jonathanjaeger
I don't know all their transactional email strategies, but I've noticed one is
those "Do you know [name] or [name]" emails that try to coax you back onto
Facebook by asking you if you know certain people and want to friend them.

------
nsomniact
It's been about a year since I placed a FB ad but I was under the impression
that whomever is placing the ad targets an audience not FB itself. If that is
still correct then whoever was placing the "coming out" ad was acting more
like an observant bartender mentioned in the article rather than an
intelligent algorithm.

~~~
wxs
This is exactly right. I mean I think Facebook is as creepy as the next guy,
but this article makes the unsubstantiated claim that Facebook guessed his
orientation. Unless they have some secret new interface for their advertisers
in this case it's unlikely. That said I'm sure they could predict this with a
high level of accuracy if they wanted to.

------
randomdata
> And in the case of the phone company, if you had a little sexy talk with
> your significant other, no one was the wiser because you had a reasonable
> expectation your amorous dialogue wasn’t being stored for posterity.

Was that really an expectation? I'm in my early 30s and still remember having
a shared party telephone line for several years of my youth and before machine
switched networks, operators were also known to listen in on conversations and
spread the latest gossip around town.

The focus on privacy seemed to not really happen until digital cell phones
started entering the scene, which is _very_ late in the life of the phone
networks.

------
smsm42
I suspect survivor bias. If you believe there is a billion people on Facebook
(even if it's wrong by order or two of magnitude, doesn't matter), several
millions of them must be gay. Some percentage of them would be closeted gay.
Some of them would have friends that visited or liked "coming out" pages. So
if Facebook just displayed random page which your friends liked - without
knowing anything else about you - it would inevitably happen that somebody who
is gay and thinks about coming out would see such ad sooner or later and would
be creeped out about how much Facebook knows about him.

------
spinchange
The "Like" button is tracking users all over the web. Isn't it possible that
their algorithms are correlating patterns in his web history for ad placement
on FB too?

~~~
arkitaip
That's what the article is saying, yes.

~~~
spinchange
It seemed like there was more emphasis on his comment on a Rob Portman gay
marriage story.

------
madsravn
I'm totally pro-facebook: It's a nice, free platform where people can share
pictures and chat (the chat is awesome since everybody has facebook).

But someday people are gonna realize how much information they have given
facebook about themselves. It's like people go out of their ways to have such
a complete profile as possible...

------
herdrick
That sounded amazing but it's just a bad title. "Facebook knows you’re gay
before your parents" would be true.

------
betterunix
This is old news; researchers figured out how to do this years ago:

[https://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/mit-students-
faceboo...](https://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/mit-students-facebook-
gaydar-raises-privacy-issues/8139)

[Edit: looks like the article mentions this]

------
smoyer
I have the perfect solution ... Randomly click on articles you have no
interest in. I'm sure (other than my nerdism) that my profile is so eclectic
that they're totally confused. And if that doesn't work, I don't have a
Facebook account.

~~~
jiggy2011
On the contrary , they know you are the sort of person who randomly clicks on
ads to confuse learning systems.

------
websitescenes
Not surprising at all. Ads are targeted based on user behavior on the entire
web, not just Facebook. Cookies and such follow you every where and are
collected by various sites.

------
mrwhy2k
FB big data will soon be able to predict your next bowel movement and
recommend reading material based on your Likes.

------
patrickwiseman
Nope, facebook wasn't around yet.

