We already know that if you use an
online social network, you give up a serious slice of your privacy
thanks to the omnivorous way companies like Google and Facebook gather
your personal data. But new academic research offers a glimpse of what
these companies may be learning about people who don’t use their massive web services. And it’s a bit scary.
Because they couldn’t get their hands on data from the likes of
Facebook or LinkedIn, the researchers studied publicly available data archived
from an older social network, Friendster. They found that if Friendster
had used certain state-of-the-art prediction algorithms, it could have
divined sensitive information about non-members, including their sexual
orientation. “At the time, it was possible for Friendster to predict the
sexual orientation of people who did not have an account on
Friendster,” says David Garcia, a postdoctoral researcher with
Switzerland’s ETH Zurich university, who co-authored the study.
Garcia’s findings showed that for people in minority
classes—homosexual men or women, for example—his profiling techniques
were 60 percent accurate. That’s a pretty high accuracy, he says, “since
a random, uniformed classification would have a precision of less than 5
percent.”
The paper only examines sexual orientation, but Garcia thinks this
type of analysis could model things such as age, relationship status,
occupation, even political affiliation. “Basically, anything that is
already shared by the users inside the social network could be
predicted,” he says.
It’s yet another reason to be wary of Facebook in particular, as the
social network’s growing size, massive user database, and increasing
emphasis on advertising revenue continues to worry users. Last week, a
two-month-old Facebook alternative called Ello
was generating 50,000 new member requests per hour—not only because it
was ad-free but because it provided a safe haven for members of the
lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community unhappy that Facebook
forced them to use their real names. But even if they flee Facebook, it
seems, the social network may still have ways to betray their privacy.
