Project Gaydar

This has been on the newswire for the last couple of days, but it is still making waves so I thought I'd comment on it. Basically, some MIT kids did a study which demonstrated that, even if you are not out on Facebook, they can guess whether you are gay or not by seeing who your friends are.

No duh.

What amazes me is that people are surprised and worried that this means that their privacy is compromised. The linked article has this pithy comment:

Discussions of privacy often focus on how to best keep things secret, whether it is making sure online financial transactions are secure from intruders, or telling people to think twice before opening their lives too widely on blogs or online profiles. But this work shows that people may reveal information about themselves in another way, and without knowing they are making it public.

Is anyone surprised in the least by this? That a stranger can tell your interests/ inclinations by the friends you hang out with?

I think we are in fact missing the bigger picture, which is that people (a) are compelled to micromanage their relationships and (b) feel a need to even be in the closet still, in this day and age. I can vaguely understand the first - sometimes you want to keep work and play separate. But as for the second, surely we've moved beyond that, especially in a forward-thinking computer-literate society?