Birds of a Feather

Two students in an MIT ethics and law class created a program that predicts whether someone is gay based only on their friend connections on Facebook. Our inner circle in some way defines us. If all your friends are over 30, you’re probably not a teenager. If all your friends attend similar churches or belong to the same political party, then you probably belong to the same religion or share the same political views.

A professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, discovered accurate predictions could be make about political affiliation based on music and group membership. But he also found just using Facebook friendship connections could also provide reliable results.

While it’s nothing new to predict who might be a terrorist, depressed or taking drugs by looking at who they hang around, only recently has so much information become available to make so many of those connections for so many people.

If social networks reveal who we are, then someone's personal information can be inadvertently shared online without realizing it. It highlights the risks of living online. Especially when potentially everything you ever do on the Internet will live forever.

Stephen Goforth