When Facebook launched its new Graph Search[(https://www.facebook.com/about/graphsearch) service, I was worried about the privacy implications, [arguing that “as the company has learned before, while it recognises a binary ‘public/private’ divide, most users don’t think in such black-and-white terms.”
And sure enough, a whole lot of information which users (surely) can’t want public is now public. The Tumblr “Actual Facebook Graph Searches” collects, well, Actual Facebook Graph Searches.
So you can use Facebook Graph Search to find “Married people who like Prostitutes” (and then click on one button to get a list of their spouses), “Spouses of married people who like [cheat-on-your-partner dating site] Ashley Madison” or “Family members of people who live in China and like [the very very banned] Falun Gong“.
Some of those — particularly the first one — will be “ironic” likes. Saying you like something on Facebook doesn’t mean you actually like it, after all. But others won’t; and it’s hard to imagine the Chinese government particularly caring if someone expressed support for Falun Gong “ironically” or not.
And then there’s the creeper potential (try “Single women who live nearby and who are interested in men and like Getting Drunk“, for instance).
Part of it might be that the people who make the product have very different standards of privacy than the rest of us. Google’s Eric Schmidt has a long-documented history of being, basically, a bit creepy, as does Mark Zuckerberg. And — maybe this is just me — even Facebook’s own demonstration of how to use graph search is a little odd. Here’s April Dembosky and Richard Waters writing for the Financial Times:
“My wife’s cousin recently moved here from India. She’s single,” he says, as he begins clicking through his Facebook profile. “I love to meddle in my family’s lives.”
Mr Stocky sets parameters for the search of his social network account. He’s looking for friends of his friends who are single men, who live in San Francisco and who are originally from India. A few more clicks and Mr Stocky has a list of romantic prospects for his wife’s cousin, culled from his own personal network.
The question left is whether this will be a storm in a teacup which will eventually rewire our normal expectations of privacy — as with the introduction of the News Feed on Facebook or the first forays into “social advertising” — or something which could damage Facebook, as the “Girls around me” app did with Foursquare and Google’s initial attempts to leverage Gmail’s network did with Google Buzz.
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