Actual Facebook Graph Searches
actualfacebookgraphsearches.tumblr.com
actualfacebookgraphsearches.tumblr.com
Companies such as Facebook and the like undoubtedly draw great power from their "social graph"; however, human interactions are subtle, complex, multifaceted and often contradictory.
Nothing good can come out of applying dumb algorithms (that is, any algorithm) to a sufficiently rich "social graph"; it will always lead to situations like that which are, at best, embarrassing, and at worst, dangerous, for whoever is in the system.
I don't think it's a matter of doing things the right way or fixing them- trying to put human relationships in a computer system will never reproduce the human experience (however, you may make marketers very happy). The best you can do is complete certain very focused subsets of it in an interesting way.
Zuckerberg's views on privacy and openness are laughable, and to be completely expected from someone of his background and world experience. If you think about who the average Facebook employee is, you'd realize that you probably wouldn't want them to be in charge of designing a system meant to model the intricacies of human interaction.
Amazon thinks I like electronics, Hello Kitty and bows.
Manual or algorithmic identification of family members is one option, but I think there's something more to be gained here by understanding the behavior just a bit more abstractly... Shopping moods? Modes? Targets? Tasks? Something, possibly – but I'm only guessing here. The real power could come from actually working with/doing user research and prototyping.
I'd love the chance to work on such a project, actually – I had a chance to work with data from a study on the online shopping habits of mothers a few years ago and there's lots of interesting angles to possibly explore, IMHO.
That said, you can manage that at http://www.amazon.com/gp/history
1) All of the people I have legitimated as Friends. 2) Screeds and screeds of data about the quality of all my connections with those friends (have I hid them from my news-feed? how much do I interact with their posts? how much do I interact with them? talk to them? share with them? stalk them? how much time do I spend in interactions with them? how do the patterns of my interactions change with them (mouse-click patterns, scroll patterns, typing patterns)? do I use different words (different emotions/more formal/informal language/different function word patterns?) 3) People I've stalked but haven't friended 4) Brands, companies, causes, ideas, things from history, all sorts of random shit I've liked (along with similar data to 2)) 5) What sorts of things I click on, how I leave the site and where I go. And certainly more.
Etc., etc., etc. Facebook didn't manifest my entire social life. They just built a platform which allowed me to socialise orders of magnitude more efficiently than before, a platform of great benefit to me, and one into which I've poured vast quantities of data (and the amount, quality and variety of the data is only set to increase as we open up more input modalities - eg eye-tracking, gesture-tracking, and biometrics). the data is all there. All facebook is doing is cobbling together some of the most very basic tools one might use to make sense of a subset of that data.
Anyway, what's your point? By the way, you're discussing this with someone who believes that in the future we will record and utilise orders of magnitude more amount of data about our lives and our planet than we do now, enough to make your eyes water, and furthermore, that we are inexorably fated to do so, and furthermore, that it's a really, really good trend, one which is going to play out in highly unpredictable and surprising ways.
Dude, what does that even mean?
Not only that, but in order to make money from advertising, they link all this wonderful data (your data) with advertiser interests. Much of this linking is done under the radar, via rules you are not allowed to see.
It's very important to distinguish the benefits of shared data with ownership and control of the data, and the rules by which it is mined and accessed.
BTW, a lot of Facebook data is "self-expression" and if given the choice in real-time, many people would elect for NOT for their contribution to go into the tech-giants mainstream database. Going into "settings" and messing around with broader privacy options for content types and particular people is an absolute joke in terms of UX and human experience in relation to expressing personal views or communicating with friends.
"Privacy settings" does not come naturally in communication. Facebook knows this, and knows people will not bother or become lazy with privacy.
Bottom line is, Facebook is an inappropriate platform for the collected data that is your life.
The big problem in the future will be the fact that as the line between "real" and "online" life diminishes, the party which holds the data will become an authority akin to governments we have today. When or why should we trust an authority? How can we be sure that the authority is trustworthy? Politics is hard enough and we all know that we can't trust politicians, how on earth are we going to trust a party with commercial interests to somehow manage our social lifes?
You seem very optimistic about things like Facebook collecting data and interlinking people's social life via their platform by using the collected data. I for one find this very scary, to such extent that I'll rather cripple my social life and not use Facebook than trust an commercial authority over the data collected about me which I have no control over.
I provide the data. I see the data. I own the data. I control the data. What is so hard about it? Honestly.
Also, not using facebook is difficult to imagine for me. It's pretty baked in to my life.
The thing is, Facebook could be better by allowing members to invite outside data to flow into their feeds from chosen sources, and providing more freedom with data-exchange in general. Enforced segregation is costly.
These aren't algorithms. This is a search engine - what you put into it is up to you. It can be anywhere from the silliness seen in the link, to "friends who live in London" before you take a trip.
This is just handing people another tool - the uses, and misuses, of said tool are entirely on the users.
> " If you think about who the average Facebook employee is, you'd realize that you probably wouldn't want them to be in charge of designing a system meant to model the intricacies of human interaction."
A snarky and mean-spirited stereotyping of all nerds as socially inept! How clever.
The social implications (for good or ill) are greater than the immediate, personal benefits are (in aggregate).
Combine that with facebook's transparent use of corporate cohabitation with people's relationships, and I think you quickly have a society which is much more determined and artificial.
I don't think it means the end of individuality as we know it. We've had ad-supported newspapers for hundreds of years now and people seemed to manage okay.
In most cases, I am arguing on the other side telling people how misinformed they are when they complain about a lack of privacy features. But this feature even has me blindsided and I am someone who uses almost all facebook privacy features very carefully(I have posts visible to Public to posts visible to only selected people, for example).
I fully expect a new set of privacy controls from facebook specifically around this feature.
Here's a link:
http://www.wired.com/business/2013/01/the-inside-story-of-gr...
| This is just handing people another tool - the uses,
| and misuses, of said tool are entirely on the users.
The same could be said of convincing people to put CCTVs in their houses and then hooking them all up chatroullete-style.
That doesn't mean that it's a good idea.
| A snarky and mean-spirited stereotyping of all
| nerds as socially inept! How clever.
That, and I assumed the 'average Facebook employee' part was assuming that they were all 20-somethings from (on average) middle-class or above backgrounds (i.e. possibly sheltered and lacking in life experience).
1.) The fact that they had this information is not surprising at all. Again maybe because I am a 20-something, I think its pretty obvious that if you had terabytes of data you would want to search it.
2.) While many people do show different parts of themselves to certain peer groups, the data Facebook has was posted to Facebook. Facebook did not install a CCTV in anyones home and log their guilty pleasures. This gets parroted a lot, but if you don't want someone to find out you love Lifetime originals, don't post it on facebook. It won't end up in the graph, and you can continue playing your identity game.
| Facebook did not install a CCTV in anyones home and log
| their guilty pleasures. This gets parroted a lot, but if
| you don't want someone to find out you love Lifetime
| originals, don't post it on facebook.
| The same could be said of convincing people to put CCTVs
| in their houses
People put most things into Facebook because they don't understand the real implications of it. They say, "I like Lifetime originals," because they want their friends to know that, or because they view Facebook's profile questions like a survey. Most of these people are techno-illiterate (including the newer generations which are just more adept at using/consuming tech than their parents).
Not at all. I'm just willing to bet that the average Facebook employee has never had to hide his sexuality/political/religious beliefs for fear of execution/incarceration/abuse to his family/etc. Yet a non-negligible part of Facebook's user base are people precisely in this situation.
That being said, the very fact that you call what the link demonstrates "silliness" speaks for itself.
I made this point in another post: the take-away from this link shouldn't be how bad it was of Facebook to not realise that making available powerful search tools for already-public data might put some people in an unfortunate spotlight. The real take-away is that we shouldn't live in a world where people should be scared to be openly gay in Iran, or openly a Falun Gong member in China. Those are the things we should focus on and try and change. And we should appreciate, rather than chastise, the tools which make us realise that there are things we need to improve in the world.
Right. Wonderful. How?
We are to some extent liable for the ill perpetrated by other people using our technology. The extent is debatable, but it must be greater than "not at all."
If anyone is wondering on the subject matter, it plots of the ascent of man not in terms of biological evolution but cultural evolution - which seems to me to be an oft overlooked facet of how we came to be.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walid_Husayin
All the stuff he's gone through—death threats, imprisonment, torture—has been for the sole "crime" of apostasy.
This graph search is going to enable sadists to lower their bar for finding victims from "people who openly and loudly proclaim their beliefs" to "people who accidentally clicked 'like' or forgot to fix their privacy settings." I have some difficulty deflecting the blame for Walid's treatment to simply being born on the wrong side of a fence. He may have known better, or perhaps he is on a crusade for religious freedom, but it's going to get a lot harder when we start talking about people with no interest in being martyrs being tortured and killed for this great cause of openness and improving the world.
What? Of course we all want the world to be a better place, but Facebook has no right to put people's lives in danger to try and force the issue. If they're so worried about making the world a better place they should do it themselves, not just open the flood gates on their users.
And how is that different from real-life?
>it will always lead to situations like that which are [bad]
I wonder if there isn't some definition analogous to "Turing complete" for social graphs? i.e. with a sufficiently powerful API, any question can be answered. Just as Turing complete-ness leads to viruses, worms, etc, might "XYZ complete" social networks lead directly and predictably towards A, B and C bad outcomes?
>Zuckerberg's views on privacy and openness are laughable
Perhaps. I'm not versed in them well enough to know. But I wonder if he isn't a bit Bill-Gates-eyan in his perspective of pushing the border between X-Y quite hard to see what bends and what breaks. For Microsoft, it was Code-Data and, while there were certainly people saying don't mix Code and Data!, people happily used their Excel spreadsheets and we suffered mightily from the resulting viruses. Whereas "viruses" were the unintended consequence of mixing Code-Data, are "outings" the result of mixing Social-Search?
Personally I think he's probably right. It has shades of that old totalitarian argument, 'why should you be worried about privacy if you don't have anything to hide?' but hopefully it'll be a little more... forgiving than that.
I don't see all this "open" information, because I don't have a facebook account.
Does this include Corporations and Governments? Or just the users of pathetic chat rooms like Facebook?
He claimed to believe that after he had make everyone's private account information public again for about the fifth time. I'm not sure if he really believes something so ridiculous and nonsensical or he simply decided to claim to have a motto that would explain why he kept revealing everyone's secrets other than the obvious one: it makes him more advertising money to do so.
Which should give one pause about whether he's giving an honest, objective assessment of the available information. One would expect quite a bit of confirmation bias when billions are on the line.
As to whether there will be a time without secrets: I don't see how that's even possible. Humans are social and tribal but they're also political. Politics is all about the tactful (mis)application of lies to swing tribal balance.
There will always be something people want to keep 'private'. Always something that the tribes disagree on and judge one another over. Regardless of whether those feelings and beliefs are substantiated in objective reality.
This graph search is just a fancy database interface, it's basically "SELECT name, age, etc from users WHERE location = 'Teheran' AND looksfor = 'men'" (massively over-simplified).
So, no it can not answer _any_ question, because it's limited by _what_ and _how_ you ask _and_ the data. You can't ask it something it doesn't already know.
What does this even mean? The "dumb algorithm" here will (a) take a user's query and (b) search that user's friends and public profiles for hits on that query. What's next: shouting about the robots taking over? Lamenting about how we're all losing our humanity and man weren't things better back in the old days?
I'm really disappointed this is the top comment on HN's top post. Users identified by Graph Search have public accounts and have willingly entered personal information into Facebook. We go thorough this song-and-dance every year: FB updates security policies, everyone is up in arms, then -- gasp! -- everyone updates their security settings. Facebook has a clear transaction with users: build a profile, get sold as eyeballs to advertisers. If you don't like it, then quit.
"With great power comes great responsibility," indeed. People have received numerous warnings about Facebook and privacy, and yet they've chosen to share personal information with everyone they know. At this point the user is responsible for choosing to participate or drop out. Meanwhile, every third HN post includes a commenter, wagging their finger, reminding us in a nasally, know-it-all voice that we're not the customer if we're not paying.
Is Graph Search really that shocking to you--to anyone on HN? Why the hell is anyone up in arms about this in 2013, given what we know about social networks?
Assuming you're socially allowed to quit Facebook.
I don't even know what that means. How is it that all of the rest of us managed to quite Facebook and continue to have a relatively vibrant social life. Is it the case that WhatsApp/Viber/SMS/Email are no longer considered effective means of communication to get together?
Because some people have different lives than you.
Of course FB is trying to destroy this as much as possible by controlling what you see of what people post. Trying to decide what's important to me is another facet of the 'dumb' algorithms the OP complains about.
Because the alternative brings the wingnuts out. The more Facebook lets people see, the more they get castigated for doing what the entire freaking purpose of a social network site is!
There seems to be some algorithm deciding what gets put into your stream by weighting posts on who you most frequently interact with and how "important" the news is, meaning that your fb experience turns more and more into a echo chamber, and posts by people that don't post often seem to get lost.
Anyway, meh I say, meh!
I'm 33, married, two kids.
I have never used Facebook but I do feel 'out of the loop.' especially since the baby arrived - I don't hear about things 'through the grapevine' and subsequently seldom find myself with many social options on the days that I have free.
This is good for my startup but bad for my self esteem.
I do have sort of a wife's account vector but tbh: she also starts feeling shit and creeped out after being in there.
It's ok, as the apologists are wont to point out, there is a choice.
Mine is made.
Are serial killers who actually kill people really shocking to people? Well, the answer to that question depends a lot on how much you let its framing determine your thinking, right?
Sure, I too, personally, don't share anything personally identifying on FB, in violation of FB and G+'s TOS BTW. But all those naive people, they walked through the door, they didn't see the samurai behind the door and pow, what do they expect? They won't be play in the Seven Samurai now. Why should we Samurai give a heck about them morons? Well, there are some reasons, starting with the fact that we have personal relations, with non-Samurai.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Samurai
"Again we are defeated," Kambei muses. "The winners are those farmers. Not us."
Yes, universally so. Because they kill people and murder is a Bad Thing.
Social networks that index information produced willingly by members aren't in the same country as your analogy.
> “Islamic men interested in men who live in Tehran, Iran“… “Places where they’ve worked.”
Censor itself in Iran?
The thing is, the results in that screenshot don't necessarily mean gay.
Interested in might mean I'm interested in networking or meeting new people, being male or female. Interested in doesn't necessarily mean I'm interested in sticking my penis in *.
Also, all people in that screenshot are also interested in females.
"Interested in men" does not necessarily mean in a homosexual way, but it can be twisted to look that way.
I accept what I'm implying is a stretch, but I'm not 100% comfortable with Graph Search either.
People are stupid, so when warned, the will still act stupid. Despite this it is still the responsibility of whoever is able, to protect them, even against themselves.
I also agree with the argument of others here that facebook, to some, seems like a social requirement. It is like having a phone. You don't NEED one, like we need air, but it makes social life harder not to. That of course doesn't mean that you need to put everything online, but that is another matter. What is happening with Facebook again and again though is that they change the rules. 'Liking' used to be quite harmless, now suddenly, my old 'harmless' likes can get someone killed or arrested, as is demonstrated in the demo searches. Not good...
Is this really a mainstream political philosophy on HN?
We are stupid in the sense that we do very stupid things even though we, in many cases (should), know better. It is the task of 'us' (people who know about internet privacy) to protect other people around us from being stupid with Facebook just as I would like to be protected by others in the things I am stupid at.
I think this is a philosophy you will find a great level of disagreement with. The ignorant should be protected and informed, the stupid, notsomuch.
This is quite misleading. Before Graph Search much of that capability was limited to Facebook Inc. and the affiliated government. This really opens the floodgates.
Were they warned? If you follow Wired and HackerNews yes. For general population though it's not something they were warned enough. They teach you how to cross a road in elementary; nobody explains you how to use privacy controls.
The whole liking and sharing ecosystem is promoted by social media itself. While you have skills to be critical of privacy implications, many more people have very vague idea or none whatsoever. Facebook de-facto is seen as a way of communicating with your social circle, that's why normal people join it; there is a (misguided) expectation of the same kind of privacy that you have in a clique of friends.
Basically, it's one of two things:
1.) such incredible naiveté that, frankly: you require supervision
2.) such hideous cynicism, so deeply felt, that it represents, to my sensibilities, a form of evil
This thing is dangerous. The people to whom it poses danger are the ones least likely even to comprehend the danger imposed upon them.
I cannot see how you could defend such a thing.
BTW: decrying the state of HN when you feel personally ill at ease with the general feeling of the community is poor form and a very strong indicator of butthurt.
YES people should be allowed to be gay in Tehran, and YES Facebook should help them with that - and they do: By not requiring you to enter your sexuality.
I don't live in Tehran, so I am privileged here - but if I put "I did tax fraud, I win!" on my public Facebook profile, and the tax authorities decided to investigate me, anyone suggesting that I didn't bring that upon myself, frankly required supervision. Even if I did it on my closed Facebook profile and a "friend" decided to report me, it's still not Facebook's fault.
Forget about being gay in Tehran. How about being gay in cyberspace?
It strikes me that you are of the belief that cyberspace ought to mimic life in meatspace directly. That one fixed identity should be all a person is entitled to.
What a waste of so many wonderful possibilities!
Cyberspace and the promise of a digital space in which to express abstract selves is something precious that is to be protected.
I believe this and I believe that exposing innocents to those running at a deficit of scruple for personal enrichment is evil.
If it's a problem that Facebook uncovers someone who's gay in Tehran, then that is only because that persons cyberspace identity mimics his meatspace one. If the gay person in Tehran profile doesn't actually link up to a physical person in Tehran, then there's no added danger to anyone.
Cyberspace allows him freedom from this oppression.
Hope that makes it clearer.
If it didn't identify individuals would it be any less useful to marketers?
Should we restrict guns so there are less accidents and murders with them, or should we trust personal responsibility, with the cost it goes attached? Is restricting even possible?
That's for you to decide, but a cost certainly exists.
An "Islamic gay man living in Tehran" in 1997 creates a web page and populates it with exactly the same personal information you are describing. Sometime later Google comes of age and indexes his site for the world to easily discover.
Do you feel that Google and Facebook are acting differently in this scenario, and if so, why?
Facebook actively promotes an anti-privacy styled online presence.
Those with the skills to build a website in '97, along with the requisite metatags to allow for the type of indexing you describe can reasonably be expected to understand what they are doing.
Not so with Facebook.
Adding content to a webpage is a pro-active move. Vanilla Facebook with no security tweaks or other expert knowledge (by my understanding) leaves users wide open through no action on the part of that user.
Did anyone opt-in to being included in Graph Search results? If they knew what it was, would anyone do this?
It's an interesting question that you pose and I think there is definitely more to it but the answer above is from the top of my head. I will mull on it some more and add should I come up with anything further.
The barrier to entry for someone to build a website in '97 wasn't much higher than it is now. Things just look prettier these days.
Do you know what this search will return? "0 results". Because nobody who is gay in Iran is going to put the fact that they are interested in other men on their facebook.
http://actualfacebookgraphsearches.tumblr.com/post/412333061...
Similarly, anyone looking to oppress gays will say, "He likes men. Why didn't he say he likes women? He must be gay." You can't argue what you really meant in a kangaroo court, or when a mob of angry villagers are throwing stones: it's too late by then.
My former boss said this in a morale speech. At the time I thought was being an a-hole. There had been some complaints on safety and usefulness of an exercise and that was his response to it.
Then I realized he was right, and that's why he's a former boss of mine.
Also, bjust silently quitting facebook and sinking back to real life
My former boss said this in a morale speech. At the time I thought was being an a-hole. There had been some complaints on safety and usefulness of an exercise and that was his response to it.
Then I realized he was right, and that's why he's a former boss of mine.
Just silently quitting facebook was something I did recently. It's not the end of the world. Quite the opposite really.
This is funny, in Iran people don't quite understand what "interested in" means. In sign up process when they see "interested in" options, they think that means "are you interested in finding friends who are male?" (same for females). This is because:
1. People use VPN to access Facebook and Facebook can not localize/internationalize their experience.
2. Using translated Facebook sucks(at least translated in Farsi)
3. Concept of homosexual relationships is not known by many iranians because of lack of education.
So there is no wonder if people in Iran marking themself gay while they are not.
(with all respect to gay people)
I suspect those least likely to select "interested in: men" are homosexually-inclined Iranians who know exactly what it's for and wish they lived in an environment where they could tick it.
A disproportionately large number of people declaring their interest in both men and women were from China. Now it's possible that Chinese students were much more likely to be [openly] bisexual than British and European ones, but every shred of evidence I've ever seen (at college, in the media and living in a relatively-liberal ethnically Chinese country) points to the opposite.
Some people read "interested in" and put men and women, because they are interested in being friends with men and women.
Go to the Likes page on your timeline. Click the Edit button in the upper right. Privacy visibility buttons will pop up next to each Like category for you to change the visibility of Likes. Make sure to scroll down to the bottom so you don't miss the last category "Other Pages You Like."
Yes, Facebook intentionally doesn't do a good job of advertising this. For me, though, I'm satisfied that the option is there (and that my option to stalk my friends is there as well).
I have a direct link to privacy settings in the header. I don't know how can they make it more visible.
I dare you.
And if he manages to do that, ask him to chart one which will be valid 2 months from now.
They keep changing that shit. Keeping up to speed is just a completely overwhelming sort of task which even most people who care about privacy wont have the stamina to do.
Even if the privacy settings do allow you to opt out of being visible in Graph Search (and there is an open question of if it would for a query that returns other people instead of you), now people's safety is involved for something they themselves have no control over.
So all this tells me is that we should focus on improving sexual freedoms in Iran and religious freedoms in China. Hopefully the people with embarrassing views will take care of themselves as tools such as this subject them to increasing scrutiny.
That they should be keeping off the Internet.
I could have expressed myself more carefully.
They most certainly are! Facebook keeps changing the rules of the game. There is a reason why so many countries have Ex post facto law. Facebook, by contract, ends up focusing on Ex post facto exploitation. Would people have put in these likes on the same account had they known that FB would create a search that would let anyone, anywhere do a simple query that exposes them in some way?
I doubt they'd have given a shit, let's be honest.
Complaining about News Feed and Graph Search is basically saying you're ok with "security through obscurity". If I understand correctly, all of this information is already available to those who want to dig deep enough.
If it's going to take me 25 days of tedious profile reading to find people who I seek (e.g. "Lesbian women from Greece who like Doritos"), I'm not going to do it. It's not practically available.
Graph Search changes that. Obscurity vanishes, along with any security it provided.
https://www.facebook.com/robots.txt
it says:
# Notice: if you would like to crawl Facebook you can
# contact us here: http://www.facebook.com/apps/site_scraping_tos.php
# to apply for white listing. Our general terms are available
# at http://www.facebook.com/apps/site_scraping_tos_terms.php
(Then there's a bunch of "Disallow:" statements for Baidu, Google, etc.)
If you follow the link, you can apply to Facebook for permission to do "automated data collection." Even if you do get permission, Facebook is very restrictive with what you're allowed to do with the scraped data.
You already said you were ok with "security through obscurity" when you logged in with a password.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4486171/isnt-a-password-a...
The only exception would be an air gapped network. But wait, what if someone figured out the passcodes and physical keys to enter the building?!
And: ”When users recognize or fear that their privacy or confidentiality is compromised, true freedom of inquiry no longer exists.”
- American Library Association, http://www.ala.org/Template.cfm?Section=interpretations&...
A couple days ago someone was asking for an automated FB deliker app/service, to automatically unlike everything you've liked on FB.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.worb.andro...
Interesting concept... showing courtesy for strangers you find in search results...
I think the anonymization, while not perfect, is enough to be considered ethical.
Is anyone willing to argue that in the future it won't be possible to query something like "find recently single women who are bipolar (i.e. frequent dramatic changes of mood/tone in wall status posts), high school dropouts, without a living father, and are easily impressed by nice cars"
The sad thing is that all the data are already in FB databases to answer queries like the above. All that's preventing mining that data is ever changing ToCs and government laws.
Can you imagine people being rounded up in China over this and put into prisons over their "like".
And if they DID, people there wouldn't be liking Falun Gong. It's a bogus example.
Is it, though? The search mentions a user who liked the Falun Gong branch in [a European city - they could probably anonymise this one a bit more]. I'm guessing there are a fairly large number of people who leave China to study or work, join Facebook while abroad, then return to the PRC at some point.
People who like Barack Obama and Mitt Romney: https://www.facebook.com/search/6815841748/likers/2139280112...
People who like MPAA and The Pirate Bay: https://www.facebook.com/search/108476252505746/likers/11101...
Why did you make that data available? Do you not want others to see it? If you didn't, then why did you put it out there for others to see?
Also, you know that privacy controls are taken into account right? So if you don't make certain data available to certain people, you don't show up in searches for those people....
I think you're being a bit irrational when you say that you're "being used".
This graph search is just the last straw. It is terrifying the repercussions this search engine could have, and I believe this blog post shows some great examples.
This open graph search will be great for marketing purposes, and a silly tool for us users. I guarantee there are going to be some serious consequences of companies/governments having the power to instantly search and sort billion's of users' data. And maybe you'll say that some great findings can come from this search; maybe we can learn more about humans and societies with this tool? Maybe, but I believe the cost outweighs the benefits.
I've noticed this argument more often w.r.t FB and other such privacy issues. I think it's flawed.
I joined FB back when it was closed. In my mind I wasn't putting anything 'out there' for the world. The first time they made things public and started messing with the default privacy settings I was worried but gave them the benefit of the doubt. Then the cycle repeated with new features and settings, which were altered from their previous states. From that point on I realised they didn't actually care about privacy the way I understand the term and they've gone on to 'open-up' more and more (rather aggressively in my view). What used to be hidden (or at least you thought it was) essentially becomes public at some point in the future.
Had I known this was the direction FB was taking I would have treated it as a public site from the very beginning. Twitter on the other hand was public from the beginning, so my interactions there have been different. I think it's unreasonable to expect that Joe Bloggs out there can get his head around what's public/private on FB. Even if they do there's no telling what might change in the future.
Of course, I could leave FB but then I'd lose touch with people. So now I leave my profile alone, hardly ever 'like' anything and generally try and limit what I do there. I'm sure FB still gleans plenty of info about me from whatever my friends do (i.e tagging photos, connecting address books etc).
Then there's photo sharing - back in the day (before multiple photo upload on Myspace) my friend group used a shared Flickr account to share photos, but it was a one way experience - no commenting or interaction.
I'm sure there are plenty of sites which do both those things better (only in the last year or so have we had the option to have reasonable resolution photos on Facebook), but without the user reach I'm not going to use them.
That being said, Facebook amongst people I know feels like Myspace just before Facebook became popular (2007ish). We use it because it's there, but there's a feeling that people are after something better. Especially with their news feed 'algorithm' which completely excludes me from hearing about news from some of my good friends.
http://readwrite.com/2012/12/11/why-are-dead-people-liking-s...
GET THE HELL OFF FACEBOOK!
But FB will definitely have to roll a great deal of this back as this is definitely deeply troubling.
It isn't currently a place to reach out or meet new people.
Because of this people will (currently) be hostile to messages from people they don't know. So while you can find interesting things and actually have a search that works now - it probably won't change behavior that much.
It is pretty cool though.
Who would actually, seriously "like" something like Prostitutes or Racism? It seems that fields like that would have literally no serious responses, beyond a bunch of frat boys goofing around.
Or is that the only expectation for searches like this anyway?
World's a weird place at times. The Internet kind of dilates the portal into those spaces.
Example: I might work for a charity related to prostitutes. So ofcourse there is a possibility that I "like" something that has to do with prostitutes.
I think lack of context is what's most dangerous these days.
http://codingplayground.blogspot.it/2013/01/facebook-graph-s...
Props to giving the people what they want!
(also for having such wonderful inventory management!)
Heh, if anything, I'm more worried about it bringing back a resurgence of random messages from people who found me through the old search which allowed you to search by these characteristics. A less reputable part of me would find it interesting to find other people who share interests with me and are gay in my area... I'm currently in the Midwest with a limited number of dating options.
I used to "like" friends fan pages without much thought, if they asked me to. Re: Ashley Madison, there are married people who work there and will choose to "like" their employer. This represents a small number of users, but is meant to show that there are legitimate use cases.
Or, to be even more reductive: public declarations are public.