The recent rash of bullying incidents, including at least two widely reported suicides, involving teenagers who are or are thought to be gay has raised the privacy and sexuality issue anew. Which, it seems, inevitably brings Facebook into play.
Only this time, we're not talking about suicide notes posted to a Facebook user's wall. Once again, a researcher has discovered that Facebook's technology can reveal to outsiders more than a user might want to share with them.
Researchers at Microsoft and Germany's Max Planck Institute recently ran an experiment to determine whether Facebook's ad targeting technology targeted users based on their sexuality. By creating six fake profiles - two straight men, two straight women, a gay man and a lesbian, all identical except for their sexuality and gender - and tracking the ads sent to the profiles, they discovered that Facebook shows markedly different ads to gay men than to straight ones.
This might seem perfectly innocuous were it not for this: Some of the ads targeted at gay men were not for businesses or services that are clearly identified with gay men. And when a user clicks on such a targeted ad, the advertiser gets personal information that also reveals the user's sexual orientation.
In the technology industry, where sexual orientation is generally not a sensitive issue, this may seem like no big deal, but that's not the case yet in the larger society. Even people who are comfortably out may choose to hide information about their sexual orientation from outsiders on Facebook, yet this feature in effect outs such users against their will to advertisers.
In the wake of the anti-gay bullying incidents, Facebook announced a partnership with the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) to counter anti-gay abuse on the world's largest social network. While it's not likely that an advertiser seeking gay male dollars would want to alienate target customers by engaging in such abuse, there's still no telling in many cases what happens once information online falls into the hands of strangers, despite all the privacy protections in the world. This revelation is likely to produce another public relations nightmare for Facebook - but it could be defused if the service follows the advice in Christopher Sogoihan's Gawker blog post about the experiment.
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By: Sandy Smith
Sandy Smith is an award-winning writer and editor who has spent most of his career in public relations and corporate communications. His work has appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Philadelphia CityPaper, PGN, and a number of Web sites. Philly-area residents may also recognize him as "MarketStEl" of discussion-board fame. He has been a part of the great reserve army of freelance writers since January 2009 and is actively seeking opportunities wherever they may lie.
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