let s talk more about how your personal information can be used to find out things about you, particularly on a social networking site. let s bring in the coauthor from a m.i.t. study, getting his phd at stanford. and carter, a software developer. guys, you used your study. just let me know if this is clear. you went on facebook, and basically from people s information on there figured out their sexual orientation. is that basically it? yes, sir. absolutely. in essence, what we were trying to test is the age-old adage, birds of a feather flock together and apply it to the digital age. and is our research showed that based on your friends online, we could infer information about you, whether you disclosed that information about yourself or not.
and one of your greatest risks is private information, information as simple as your birthplace could put your identity at risk. and is this why. internet crime costs have doubled. check out these numbers, we went from $265 to $595 for internet crimes. this is scary. last year, two researchers say they were able to predict millions of social security numbers based solely on your full name, birthplace and birth date. the social security administration says we shouldn t be worried about the research, but they worried enough to change the way social security numbers are actually assigned. and this just this past month, netflix dropped a contest to help the company better identify customer preferences. it was a follow-up contest to one that netflix did a couple years ago. they posted customer ratings that they said had been stripped of all customer identification. but two researches were able to identify some of the customers, simply by linking large
political affiliations, religious affiliations, income bracket, those kinds of things. so there s nothing to suggest that this work is just specific to sexual orientation. in reality, for this type of network data, you could have lots of privacy risks associated across a gamut of different traits. carter, if i were gay, i may not want to say that on facebook, but it may not matter if that information was out there. if i say i m from atlanta, it may not matter. where is line to protect information you don t want out there? should i be on facebook if i don t want people to know where i live, where i shop, who my friends are or what my sexual orientation is? is it just too much information to be able to protect yourself? right. and it s become very difficult to keep all of that information private. and so as part of ow research, we were very interested in raising awareness in these sort of surprising risks with online
databases together. so here s the risk. even if you remove your name, your e-mail address and your birth date from your online profiles, and you have many of them, everything can be tracked on line. birthday wishes from your family, vacations you take. last year, two m.i.t. researchers did a sexual orientation study prediction on facebook based solely on your friends. the two researchers are live with us. we ll talk with them after the break about what you need to do to keep your information safe. stay with us.
carter, is that particularly scientific? because i guess you could sort of figure it out when you look at things like that or figure out where somebody is from, based on where their largest concentration of friends is, or where they went to college, even if they didn t put that on. was this sort of a mystery to you? i think what was novel about our research is that we ve really shown that this birds of a feather phenomenon applies in online communities, even when people don t publicly disclose information. so if your profile had basically no information and it was very bare-bones, just by seeing who you re associated with, we could certain learn significant information about you. let s take it beyond sexual orientation. where else could you be vulnerable about people learning things you didn t feel like you wanted to have known on facebook, for instance? that s a great question. go ahead. there s emerging work that s adjusting that similar information could be found about