Closeted? Your Facebook friends could out you

A very, very small scale “unpublished” study by some MIT students may indicate some larger privacy concerns.

As users click around the internet, they leave a handy trail of information bits to define themselves. The MIT students suspected that even if you weren’t directly out and proud on a social networking site like Facebook, a program could scan your friends list and effectively out you anyway. Out of a sample of 1,500 students, 10 were gay and did not reveal their sexual orientation on their profiles. The program correctly identified all 10 men as gay.

“When they first did it, it was absolutely striking – we said, ‘Oh my God – you can actually put some computation behind that,’ ” Hal Abelson, a MIT computer science professor, told the Boston Globe.

“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.”

While the sample is small and the program blind to lesbians, it poses interesting questions about what else can be gleaned about you from your Facebook friends. Medical conditions? Partying habits? Unpopular political inclinations? If anything, it’s a warning to anyone who thinks they’re hiding behind a friends lock. And reminds us of the new-old adage about not posting anything on the internet that you don’t want ending up in your grandma’s inbox.