Adds that make you think you are gay

Christianna Silva is a staff writer for Newsweek covering civil rights with a focus on LGBT issues and police brutality. She hails from the University of Arizona and a small town on the Southern border. You can also catch her listening to bad punk music and hanging out with her cat, Colby Jack.

Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. Facebook advertisements take one swift look at a few of your "likes," and make a decision about your sexual orientation, drug use history and more—whether you purposefully post it on your profile or not, according to a new study out of Big Data.

This is a really bad way to tell if someone is queer.

The gay Guinness ad that never ran

For instance, if a person on Facebook "likes" Lady Gaga, Glee and the Human Rights Campaign, Facebook is likely to assume that person's sexuality is gay. They make these assumptions to exploit information about someone's personal characteristics that they haven't made public on the internet—such as being gullible, introverted, female, a drug user or gay.

But the problem with Facebook's assumptions runs deep. This is particularly worrying for LGBT people who aren't yet publicly out. LGBT people are more likely to be targets of a hate crime than any other minority groupand outing people who are closeted could lead to dangerous implications.

There haven't been many reported instances of this specific move by Facebook outing people, but within the short history of social media, several incidents have highlighted the real-life risks and consequences of online information about sexual orientation.

Ivar, a queer international student at Harvard, was outed a few years ago to all of his Facebook friends after RSVPing to his first queer dating event on the site. The study's researchers, who hail from Columbia Business School, New York University and Northeastern University, say one of the responses to these kinds of privacy issues could be a "cloaking device" that would protect users from having advertisers make assumptions based on their likes.

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