Facebook Will Begin Making Graph Search Public On Monday

I've had graph search for a few months now, but have only played with it recently, and it's terrifying.

The other night, after getting pizza delivered, I did a search for "Women who live in Oakland and who work at Domino's Pizza". Boom, here was the girl who delivered my pizza. Not only did I get pictures of her, her first name, and her last name, but also status updates just in case I felt like tracking her life.

Further searches allowed me to find personal information on government employees (eg DMV) in my city, the waitress who served me last night, and so on. More extreme use cases (for example, finding gay men in notoriously homophobic countries) have been pointed out in the past. Similarly, a good friend of mine managed to track down the Apple genius who had taken care of his computer just by knowing basic information ("he lives in Seattle and works at the Apple Store").

Yes, the data is there, people should be careful about what they post online, yada yada. The truth is that a person with nefarious intentions can use Facebook's graph search in an extremely effective way to carry out their intentions. It's fucking ridiculous.