Erik Hayden at Miller McCune links to a study done Alan Mislove of Northeastern University and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems
that reveals how easy it is to create a profile of you from your Facebook contacts. Using alogrithmic magic, the team was able to create profiles for thousands of students at Rice from their profiles and the profiles of those they had “friended.”

the algorithm accurately predicted the correct dormitory, graduation year and area of study for the many of the students. In fact, among these undergraduates, researchers found that “with as little as 20 percent of the users providing attributes we can often infer the attributes for the remaining users with over 80 percent accuracy.

Hayden sees this as a problem:

Not to seem alarmist (“privacy” on the Web has always been overrated), but if these researchers could develop a limited algorithm that can infer rudimentary attributes off locked profiles, the possibilities seem endless for others to harness advanced software that could render current privacy controls completely useless.

This poses a paradox…if people freely give this information to a web site in exchange for the pleasures of friendship/connection, then are we obliged to regulate how the information is used by others? Isn’t a central element of connection the fact that you’re “putting yourself out there” in public. Being public poses risks. Can we have the pleasures of the public with the protections of the private?