MIT Students Invent 'Gaydar' Software

Is this really useful? I mean, everyone can pretty much tell a homo from a hetero in real life, and if they can't, they need more than a software program to help them. Online, do you really care? As long as the risk of them grabbing my butt is zero, I don't care at all if a guy is gay or not.

Should I?

The other side is, now they will have homosexuals worried about how they act online. Is that really fair to them? Don't they have enough problems dealing with how they act in real life? Now they have to worry online too. Good grief.

lol....i don't like gay people

haha i think queers are dumb

The point is not that they are going to market a program that can do that, so much as letting people know that you reveal a lot more about yourself, on social networking sites, then you might otherwise have realized.

I'm afraid to leave a comment here. Someone might find out I'm gay!

I'm a female lesbian stuck in a mans body...

i guess it was pretty obvious all along! atleast to me it was

I don't need their software. My Gaydar is already deadly accurate.

Is this you?

http://www.peopleofwalmart.com/?p=3346

That's not exactly true. I've met normal looking people that turned out to be gay. Also told a lady about a guy who was wearing finger nail polish and she didn't have a slight clue he was gay. It's not as easy as you kids think.

Why does it even matter if someone is gay? As long as they aren't imposing on you, they should be able to do whatever they want. Who cares. This news story is useless.

I can usually pick out which guys are gay, they are the unusually charming, well dressed, good looking men who don't have a wife, yet their house is actually clean. The rest are straight.

General Activity of a Young Dudes Area of Relativity,




GAYDAR,

Why are people 'thumbs upping' the anti-gay comments...And it isn't always obvious, though yes in many cases it is.

My thoughts exactly. Sigh.

They dont really care if they are homosexual or not. It is a proof of concept. It is for marketing. Now imagine facebook knows you are gay and starts to shape thier ads accordingly. Also lets say they can determine other things like social status, income, personal preferances, etc. Then they can shape marketing to match. Or if you are paranoid than just think the government will know way more about you than what you would like them to. I wouldnt be suprised if the gov. doesnt already have statistical software like this already. That way the can pander to different groups, not that it matters they all just lie anyway.

I can imagine a member of the CIA reading this and chuckling. They can probably tell how many asshairs you have by your friends of facebook but they don't bother because they have satellites that can see how many asshairs you have anyway.

Anyone else picking up on the Futurama reference here? I mean, no one else seems to have commented on it.

Better yet is the study that links homophobia and dislike/hatred of gay people with homosexual arousal. There is a strong link between people who hate gay people and people who are afraid of gay people and being aroused by homosexual porn. Do a google search for the study and be prepared to laugh.

I'd say the real issue is what ELSE can be gleaned from similar analysis. It's not like terrorists will have a bunch of terrorist friends, at least there's probably no checkbox marked 'pro-terror', but say one of your friends turns out to be into Child Pornography. Will some researcher send the cops over to interview YOU?...

This isn't exactly groundbreaking research. It's been known for years now that you can extrapolate information about people from collections of other information related to them. This is already being used on a smaller level with grocery store discount cards, online retailers, music personalization software, and search engines. An even older practice which achieves the same results is profiling. Contemporary social networking just makes it easier.

And gay people don't like you. I'm guessing straight people don't like you either.



In which case you are queer. Have some false logic dummy.

Hah, that's crazy. I'm sure that it has some degree of accuracy, but I think it goes out the window for the few of those who want to have the most friends and friend everyone they see and their cat (why people give their pets pages I'll never know). Wonder what kind of issues this could have if employers ever start using something like this.

It's actually more difficult than you would think. I don't act or appear any different from my straight peers, and yet I'm gay. The only people you can really tell are those who are "MTV gay" or "Jack gay" (Will & Grace ref.) or if they display PDA. There are also some straight men who appear to exhibit the gay stereotype. So, no. You can't tell for sure most of the time IRL.

This story reminds me of that King of Queens episode where the Tivo recorded shows like Will and Grace, Queer as Folk, and The L Word for him, and he goes "Tivo thinks I'm gay!" I believe Project Gaydar was created by two guys with too much time on their hands.

I guess then I'm a Pornbot based on my twitter following, and i do MLM and Forex on the side.

This is a pretty offensive concept to be honest.

Has anyone ever seen that episode that Steve Colbert interviewed that British guy that invented a gaydar. LOL good times.

They can't find out anything about you if you are absent from all social networks in the first place. I prefer to stay in touch via email/phone/in-person with all my friends. It's too much work and too impersonal to maintain all that social networking crap. I am very happy without it.

All this time I was rather sure that I was openly gay, but I guess I was wrong given that almost all my friends are straight. Hmmm, I suppose my partner is just a phase...

Next month some gay MIT student will invent a "stealth" counter measures against the Gaydar......

FAGGOT