= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
wedrifid comments on Open Thread, September, 2010-- part 2 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (858)
Really? Where can I find said algorithms? Knowing how they work would obviously be a useful way of thwarting them.
Here's the article where I heard about the gay facebook page thing:
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/09/20/project_gaydar_an_mit_experiment_raises_new_questions_about_online_privacy/?page=full
Here's where I read about calculating SSN's:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/07/social-insecurity-numbers-open-to-hacking.ars
Apparently, it looks at the self-reported gender and sexual orientation of your Facebook friends, and uses that information to guess your own sexual orientation. Here's how I would do that:
Gather three variables: your gender, the male/female ratio of your friends, and the ratio of gay-or-bisexual to straight people among those of your friends who state their own sexual orientation. If I wanted to be extra-fancy, I might also include a sparse array of events and clubs that the person was signed up for.
Apply some standard machine learning tools to this, discretizing variables if necessary. Use people who report their sexual orientation as training and testing data.
Practice my evil villain laugh.
In order to defend against this, you could apply steps 1 and 2, then look at what the machine learning program tells you. Try to match its profile of a straight person. Then you can remain Facebook-closeted even in the face of the all-seeing electronic gaydar.
It's theoretically obvious that you can try to do it this way with a nontrivial chance of success, but not at all obvious that given enough skill and work, success is assured (which was the claim). The latter would require (knowledge of) actual experiments.
I have no problem with people knowing that I'm gay. Come to think of it I have no problem with people knowing my social security number. (We don't even have a commonly used equivalent here. Although driver's licence numbers and birth citificate IDs are sometimes useful.)
I've heard of one for determining your sexual orientation (if you don't reveal it on your info page), but it's based on the revealed sexual orientations of your friends (if a lot are gay, you probably are too), so it's harder to thwart than, say, something based on your favorite songs.