Project ‘Gaydar’: An MIT experiment raises new questions about online privacy

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.")

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.

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.

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

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

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!

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.)