Facebook users are to brace themselves for another significant change to the site – Graph Search, a feature that means it has never been so important to get those privacy settings right.
So we’ll start by explaining just what Graph Search is, which is essentially an advanced search/filtering tool that allows Facebook users to search for people based on a wide range of different criteria, from Likes, locations, education, religious or political views, age, occupation and gender. The search criteria only works for information that is public, but worth noting is that the search results are certainly not limited to your friends. In fact Facebook users have the potential to be pulling detailed results from the entire Facebook community – i.e. largely strangers.
The Graph Search will eventually be replacing the relatively basic Search option that Facebook users currently have at the top of their Facebook pages.
And just like most major alterations Facebook introduce, there is serious privacy concerns that come attached to the Graph Search.
It is important to point out that just like the Facebook real-time update Ticker, Graph Search will not be making any private information accessible. The information it uses in its gathering process is all public. However – again just like the Ticker – it means that if you have any information on Facebook that it set to public, regardless of who uploaded it, it has never been so easy for anyone to find.
Perhaps one of the most worrying aspects of Graph Search is that it isn’t just a tool to find and filter your friends. Instead, all Facebook users who have any kind of information set to public are liable to be at the business end of a search result.
So whilst Facebook may be promoting Graph Search as an innocuous, friendly tool to find out which of your friends likes skateboarding or how many friends live in a particular city, a sinister reality is that users can use Graph Search to collect photos of people they don’t know, or nefariously browse for vulnerable singles, or even finding out where strangers live and work.
In other words, with the ability to search and collate information about strangers so easily, and filter those results in pretty much any way you want, is Open Graph really just a stalkers best friend?
This also doesn’t bode well with a recent survey that shows 37% of employers use sites like Facebook to research potential job candidates, and viewing those drunken photos with Graph Search has never been easier, even drunken photos of you uploaded by friends.
It doesn’t stop there, as programmer Tom Scott highlights in some of his recent searches which go into even darker places. Scott highlights how unsettling searches are easily achievable such as seeing if you live by racists, or BNP members. Or how about Jews who like Bacon, or those who follow Islam but are also interested in same sex relationships. If that information is public then it has never been so easy to find.
So perhaps the real question is why do Facebook seem to be increasing the social factor between strangers? Social networking sites are all about interconnecting and sharing with friends. But between strangers? Facebook, in some of their promotional videos, say they want to make the world a smaller place, which would be okay if we all lived in an idealist’s perfect harmony with each other. But we don’t.
Making the world a smaller place may be a neat catchphrase but there are real implications when you actually try to do it.
And in their bid to make Facebook a smaller place they seem to be displaying a level of hypocrisy. Tom Stocky, a Product Director for Facebook, says Graph Search can be used for finding those people who you should be friends with based on its ability to search through people you live by who may share similar interests.
But isn’t this a contradicting message from Facebook, who actively advise their users not to befriend other users who they do not know personally? So much so that sending friend requests to people that a user does not know can actually get that user blocked from sending further requests, or even banned from Facebook.
On one hand Facebook are advising their users to only befriend people they know, and on the other Graph Search appears geared toward socialising strangers. If you’re confused, you’ve got every right to be.
No matter what you think of it, Graph Search is coming, the next step to revolutionising the Internet and Facebook isn’t leaving anyone behind. This means that any piece of information available to the public is going to be easier to find than ever before, which as we have highlighted in this article can lead to some serious problems down the line.
This is why now is as important as ever to lock down your privacy settings to make sure the private content you post and share on Facebook is not accessible to Graph Search, and thus not accessible to the entire Facebook community to search, collect and scrutinize. For information on getting your privacy settings right you can read our article here which guides you through Facebook’s latest privacy settings.
But it’s not just your own privacy settings that are important. We mentioned above that public information about you will be accessible via Graph Search no matter who uploaded it – this means that those Facebook friends that don’t take privacy as seriously as you can still play a part in causing you a headache.
The easiest way to demonstrate this is with photos uploaded to Facebook. If your friends are uploading public photos with you tagged in, then these photos are still accessible via Graph Search. To borrow an example we discussed above, these photos would still be accessible to employers looking at potential job candidates. So even with your own account locked down, can you be sure there are no embarrassing public photos of you that have been uploaded by your friends? Photos that are barely a click away from being discovered by almost anyone.
Graph Search should not only encourage a user to lock down their own account, but it might be time for users to start communicating with their friends to make sure everyone is on the same page. Privacy for one, privacy for all.
Once again these Facebook changes are invoking a popular online privacy debate. The privacy settings are available to users, but many choose not to use them, or perhaps are simply not aware they exist. So is it the fault of the user for not locking down their information, or Facebook’s fault for making their settings too complicated and making it too easy for others to view and collect our information?
What do you think? Will you be sorting out your privacy settings? Let us know.
