The Creepy Details of Facebook's New Graph Search

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/01/facebooks-graph-search

by petrel • 14 years ago

96 36 14 years ago

Seems to me like Facebook was already using these "creepy details" on a daily basis in targeted advertisements. I looked through the ad process, and you could choose any of the options they have in the article (age range, likes, location, etc.)

cheald3• 14 years ago

I think it's quite different for a company to use "creepy details" to deliver targeting advertising than it is to make that information available to the public in an easily discoverable fashion.

Graph Search is really interesting from a data standpoint, but I don't at all see how it's going to mesh with the realities of how people like their data to be managed.

lostnet2• 14 years ago

How can you feel about clicking on an Ad that matches one interest of yours if you don't know the additional targeting criteria?

The more specific the criteria, the more likely the "advertiser" is a spear fisher.

I can think of a couple exploits (Err- links) one might pay to send to "groups" like: All Oracle employees who like sailboats and tennis. All Universal Health Care employees who like Oracle. All apple employees who hate google maps.

The total cost of these 3 "campaigns" might be $30. You may hit these targets with a wider google campaign, but that would cost more and entail greater risk (i.e. people at mcafee who like nmap and Oracle.)

mbesto• 14 years ago

Just so I understand this correct, if everyone is only sharing things explicitly with friends or friends of friends, doesn't that render the open social graph search useless?

jpalacios• 14 years ago

On the advertising side, I don't think it matters what the sharing settings are. We have been targeting on very specific parameters with quite a large reach for a while now.

makomk• 14 years ago

A lot of the information this searches can't actually be locked down by privacy settings anymore, as far as I can tell. Facebook made most profile information public for everyone whether they wanted that or not.

Techasura• 14 years ago

One thing you should know is, the search has become more easy rather than typing some name in search and selecting "education,location,workplace". SO, the search i believe has now been turned out more like ruby syntax.

brown9-2• 14 years ago

This feature has rolled everyone, by default, into a dating service ("Single females in San Francisco who like Radiohead") and a marketing database ("People under 25 who like Coca-Cola").

This assumes that the advertisers didn't have access to searches like this already. That seems very unlikely.

notahacker• 14 years ago

Marketers have certainly been able to do "people who added our app who are x and like x" queries for a while.

The only difference is that ordinary people can do it with their friends and no obscure query syntax.

user24• 14 years ago

That's not the only difference. There's a big difference between "Hey facebook, show my ad to singles who like dogs" and "Hey facebook, show my the profiles of people who are singles and like dogs".

thirsteh• 14 years ago

That's how Facebook Ads worked/works.

Wilya• 14 years ago

Did they have access to this, or did they have access to "show my ad to everyone who matches this query" ?

I don't see why Facebook would allow advertisers to build databases of people when they can just force them to go through their own tool and keep people anonymous, like Google does.

Also, this is free, as opposed to advertising tools, which broadens the audience quite a lot.

0x0• 14 years ago

I don't think they have access to that, and you are right, there's a big difference between getting search results with actual people links, and getting your ad anonymously delivered to people matching a given criteria.

By the way, you can click through the "create an ad" process quite far on facebook before you have to actually pay for it, so for those curious, why not give it a go and see for yourself what the process looks like? :)

ryguytilidie2• 14 years ago

Right, I just don't get why Facebook had a huge rollout for a feature that provides very little, if any value to users, and tons of value to advertisers. It really says a lot about where they are as a company IMO.

mtgx• 14 years ago

Maybe because they don't really have any exciting, innovative products on the horizon for consumers, and that's the best they could do right now.

spullara• 14 years ago

This at least exposes what you could have been doing all along using their API. If anything it is better that they launch this and people realize the implications rather than developers being able to do it without people really understanding the implications.

smokeyj• 14 years ago

And how the law will use it. Seems like a great way to find criminals and activists at scale

malandrew• 14 years ago

I find it creepy that our impression of the government now has us lumping criminals and activists into the same sentence and thought.

Shenglong• 14 years ago

I personally think this feature is really cool, and has the capacity to be really useful. While I don't personally mind people creeping me, it will likely have vast social implications.

For example: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/46245195/jealousy-machine.jpg

melvinmt• 14 years ago

I really like it. The constantly increasing social pervasiveness is inevitable and I've made my peace with it a long time ago.

I understand why it took them this long to come out with something like this. For this to work, you need massive amounts of data, something Facebook has plenty of after receiving a firehose of data for so many years.

Google has failed in social search, because (ironically) they had the search first, but not the data. IMHO this is exactly what they were afraid of and the main reason why they keep pushing on G+ hard.

Most importantly, Graph Search finally "captures the intent" - which made Adwords so good - that FB Ads was badly missing. Expect to see their revenues soaring in the coming years.

SkyMarshal• 14 years ago

>Google has failed

You say that as if the competition was a specific event with a discrete ending time, rather than continuously ongoing process that ever ends.

richardjordan2• 14 years ago

Think about what this will do for discriminatory hiring. Searches on who has liked political statements or views that are disapproved of by corporate policy. Again as others have state - big difference between this stuff being discoverable and it being easily searched, sliced and diced.

freshhawk3• 14 years ago

What's the big difference other than smaller players having access to this information?

Maybe I'm going to far applying computer security concepts to real life but this was possible before, so making it easier to access only really changes how educated the users are about over-sharing. I mean, if you wanted to educate people in a "wow that's creepy" way like firesheep did you would build something like this.

If you shared it online and it's linked to your real name then you have to assume anyone can get a hold of it.

In the practical world you make an excellent point about discriminatory hiring, but I feel like this was going to happen anyway so better to open things up now and hopefully scare people into realizing what they are doing when they post private information publicly. The longer the time until this happens, the worse it will be when it does right?

richardjordan2• 14 years ago

I think this is a classic example of where there's a meaningful difference between possible and really easy. To use a topical analogy. People in the UK can do a mass-killing, with knives or clubs. People in the US can do it a whole lot easier because they have access to high powered firearms.

kmfrk• 14 years ago

Privacy and utility are mutually exclusive, privacy and utility are mutually exclusive.

This can't be said often enough.

I personally hate Facebook because of Zuckerberg's disregard for Steve Jobs's definition of privacy: to know what you've signed up for.

But there's definitely a lot of utility for those who willingly hand over their personal information. It's a trade-off, and I'm fine with it, as long as people knowingly, willingly accept that.

betakappaphido• 14 years ago

Wasn't it Assange that said fb was the greatest spying machine ever invented? Why the heck people will continuously give away private information with no safeguard that information will ever remain private in the future, I will never understand. Graph Search is just one more example of 'transparency creep' until there is only a microcosm of privacy left, and even that will likely be an illusion.

freshhawk3• 14 years ago

> Why the heck people will continuously give away private information with no safeguard that information will ever remain private in the future, I will never understand

I do understand. People don't evaluate risk correctly. They are fundamentally irrational in all sorts of strange ways. Humans have a strong optimism bias[1] so even if they know something bad might happen to some people they know that will happen to other people, not to them. The benefit, even when it's tiny in comparison, they get right now.

Thanks to the fascinating new neuroscience around cognitive biases you too can go from thinking you'll never understand to despairing for the future of humanity!

At least now someone will probably do a Firesheep-esque [2] "look how creepy you can be" app that will get some attention. And that kind of attention is exactly the antidote to the optimism bias as well as many of the others at play here, it's actually very effective because it plays into other well known biases [3][4]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimism_bias

[2] http://codebutler.com/firesheep/

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attentional_bias

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic

The Creepy Details of Facebook's New Graph Search

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