If you tell Facebook you're in a relationship, but don't say with whom, then you might think you've got some privacy. But think again: A newly developed algorithm can identify which "friend" you're dating and predict whether or not that relationship will last. The number-crunching was conducted by a computer scientist and a Facebook engineer, using a dataset of 1.3 million Facebook users who met three criteria. Each was 1) at least 20 years old, 2) listed their relationship status as married, engaged or dating and 3) had at least 50 friends. The researchers used the data to come up with a new metric they call dispersion---the extent to which two people's mutual friends overlap.
In a relationship with high dispersion, a woman would be connected to all of her boyfriends' closest friends, and he to hers, but those friends would not be friends with one another. In a relationship ...
