hello again, thank you for all the comments. i was very curious about the facebook study, also because of the names of the researchers who executed the story. lars backstorm has been one of the first authors to tackle the problem of impoosibility of "anonymity" in social network like data structures ***. his paper together with cynthia dwork (the person who developed differential privacy) and jon kleinberg (a prominent social network/graph analyst) was one of the first to show that simple anonymization of a social network by simple de-identification of nodes in the network does not work. i am just wondering why and to which objective there now is this collaboration between social network service providers and researchers that are keen social network analysts? i am curious as to if this is about providing tools that make the information on social networks transparent, and if so, for whom? for marketers, scientists, politicians etc. more interestingly, who decides what transparency is, and how the results are constructed, validated, and made open to questioning and contestation. this is obviously not talked about at all, there is only a pointer that these researchers are now working together with facebook. on a related note, i am concerned with such studies and their construction of statistical identity or truth. first of all, what counts as race in itself can be very controversial, as was evident from the many points raised in the different emails. quantification of race, as necessary as sometimes that may be for equal opportunity actions or political projects, also re-produces what race is. so, it seems what we have a mix of three things: (1) a construction of race (2) a construction of names and racial order, and (3) social networks and its user "diversity". the result is a study that melts these three elements together. i am just wondering, how such a complex statistical and social matter becomes so smooth that it can be fit onto one page with no open questions and what are ways of questioning the study. i would appreciate any further comments you may have in the direction. and, once again, thank you for all the others, especially with respect to references on race and class on social networks, the topic, regardless of facebooks ability to water it down to some mind turning statistics, remains complex and interesting. s. ***Wherefore art thou r3579x?: anonymized social networks, hidden patterns, and structural steganography. Lars Backstrom, Cynthia Dwork, Jon M. Kleinberg. WWW 2007 Disclaimer: http://www.kuleuven.be/cwis/email_disclaimer.htm