By their friends shall ye know them.....

...was one of the points raised by Mat Morrison during his talk at TEDxTuttle on Thursday last week. His point was that in a social network, even if you don't give away much about yourself, a lot about you can be predicted from your friends - especially those you interact with frequently. This has some "interesting" applications, for example unintentional outings, as an MIT study reported in the Torygraph showed:

The small-scale survey indicates that people who believe they have discreet online habits may still be making personal information about themselves public.

As part of the study the researchers Carter Jernigan and Behram Mistree scanned the Facebook friends of more than 1,500 fellow students who indicated their sexual orientation – straight, gay or bisexual – on their profiles.

This analysis revealed that homosexual men had proportionally more gay friends than straight men, allowing the students to devise a computer programme to predict the sexual orientation of other Facebook users based solely on the sexualities of their friends.

They ran this programme on 10 men who were known to be homosexual but did not reveal this information on their profiles. In each case, the software correctly identified the men to be gay.

Mat used similar approaches to tell political affiliation. Time to start recruiting some faux friends quick, to put those digital gaydars off the scent.................

Update - I see the Panglossian Right-on Tendency are horrified at this, but its just the inevitable dark side of the social web's lax privacy systems.