I try to blog about the impact of technology, and business, on ethics. The same goes the other way around. When should your ethical compass encourage or discourage a person to act a certain way? In this case, technology has enabled some MIT students to create software they call Gaydar that can give a statistical value to your Facebook profile and decide within reasonable certainty that you are in fact, gay. One caveat though;
“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.”
The article, found on The Boston Globe, was written by Carolyn Y. Johnson. You can visit it here.
Frankly, there is absolutely no reason for this piece of technology to exist. No point to it. A persons sexual orientation is not something to calculate on a large scale unless you are going to use it for dubious acts. To base it on the profile of users of a social network, to me, is irresponsible. Another quote from the article and then I’ll let you go read the full article so you can decide what to think about it:
“Hal Abelson, a computer science professor at MIT who co-taught the course. ‘That pulls the rug out from a whole policy and technology perspective that the point is to give you control over your information – because you don’t have control over your information.’”
But we do have control over our information. It is how you abuse that information that we don’t have control over. Mainly because people have a corrupt ethical compass. To qualify and quantify someones friends and associations into a construct that decides if you are gay or not is just plain wrong. Ultimately, I think the project will prove itself to be invalid beyond the fact that there are situations where if you are a baker and you have 20 baker friends in your profile, there is a weighted chance that you too are a baker.. You can’t know, because of your associations, how someone lives their lives. But, I don’t have any SCUBA diver friends in my facebook… but I’m a diver. If anything, this shows that Facebook is a leaky faucet of privacy as I’ve said since things like Classmates.com were created. If a person with no moral compass discovers an exploitable factor, they will. Eliminating those holes are whats important.
MIT just showed everybody on facebook how exposed they are. But we’ve known that for years.
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