Anyone else think the post title is disingenuous? Seems written to infer that Facebook was the tool that lead six million Americans to feel comfortable about their sexuality and opening come out.<p>But they define coming out as simply setting your sexual preference as being the same sex as your own. Facebook isn't helpIng or causing this, people are just expressing it on a social network.<p>Just bothersome personally, because it sounds self-righteous and as if Facebook is help progressing equality. In reality, allowing users to express they are gay (and any other tools/changes that made this easier, as discussed in the blog post) are simply measures Facebook implemented to help mine more extremely personal information about individuals in order to better peddle Totino's Party Pizza™.<p>Personally, just tired of brands that attempt to push such an agenda. You want to know if I'm gay so you can target me with more appropriate ads. You don't care less about how such a personal decision changes my life.
I came out on Facebook, after telling my 20 most important friends in person. I didn't set my preference to "gay", I just wrote it in a picture, in the hope that Facebook itself would have a harder time registering this information. Therefore I don't think I qualify for their stats. From my experience the guesstimate of 10% people being gay is close to the truth, so Facebook is missing 30m gays in the US...<p>Concerning privacy, on the other hand, Google Reader, The Old Reader and Tumblr have extremely precise details about my tastes. I wonder what my profile at the NSA looks like: My facebok is registered under a false name against an email which is now defunct and I browse it in a separate Chrome profile, but they could easily recoup me if they notice I use the same camera to post on facebook and other websites.<p>Or Facebook could notice I browse gay friends with more interest ;)
I "came out" on Facebook because I changed my gender to "gender nonconforming"... but the only reason I did that is because my friends already know me, and Facebook isn't my friend.