Actual Facebook Graph Searches

http://actualfacebookgraphsearches.tumblr.com/

by ig1 • 14 years ago

509 239 14 years ago

actualfacebookgraphsearches.tumblr.com

psbp10• 14 years ago

Goodbye Facebook.

jgalt212• 14 years ago

+1 to that.

corporalagumbo22• 14 years ago

Haven't heard that one before...

rogerchucker7• 14 years ago

You need to take a break from your Facebook apologism. It's getting cartoonish.

harlanlewis• 14 years ago

Consider: “Family members of people who live in China and like Falun Gong”.

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&...

stephengillie• 14 years ago

Where's the EFF Panopticlick for your FB likes? To tell you how well you stick out or blend in with the crowd? (though blending in with the crowd is just security through obscurity...)

A couple days ago someone was asking for an automated FB deliker app/service, to automatically unlike everything you've liked on FB.

klinquist• 14 years ago

Best to just set it up so "Only you" can see your own likes.

http://abrax.us/Facebook/EditLikes.php

kefs• 14 years ago

Exfoliate for Android (which stopped working for me after timeline, but i haven't retried since)

http://www.exfoliateapp.com/

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.worb.andro...

aviswanathan• 14 years ago

Maybe it's just me, but the FB Graph Search intro video seemed to be more of an objective-based searching tool. I (probably stupidly) assumed it could serve as a sidekick to Google search. Forgot that the majority of Facebook users use the default search to find (stalk) other people, and this is just an engine to do it more efficiently. I'm starting to be a bit wary about the monetization potential of FB Graph Search.

GuiA2• 14 years ago

With great power comes great responsibility.

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.

psbp10• 14 years ago

I hate to flip the script on social networking, but I think google is doing a pretty good job with focusing on exploration and compartmentalization of friends and social groups in +. Maybe something like graph search is their eventual intention, but I really hope their vision is less...disastrous.

corporalagumbo22• 14 years ago

Really? Nothing good? From any algorithm at all? How can you be so sure? Amazon seems to do a pretty good job thinking up new stuff I might like with its algorithms, for one.

newman314• 14 years ago

Try an Amazon account which is shared with family members.

Amazon thinks I like electronics, Hello Kitty and bows.

psbp10• 14 years ago

I don't think he's saying that at all. The insanity is trying to construct a platform that manifests a person's entire social life. I think there's a harsh combination of conflating business interests and disinterested, contrived people sorting that is potentially very, very bad.

potatolicious• 14 years ago

> "Nothing good can come out of applying dumb algorithms (that is, any algorithm) to a sufficiently rich "social graph""

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.

psbp10• 14 years ago

This tool is part of a much larger machine that may actually affect society more than it serves it.

zaidf• 14 years ago

This is a tool that lets you search data, some of which was collected on a false(or dishonest) expectation set by facebook that the data will not be searchable in this manner. That is a violation of trust. I say this as a huge fan and user of facebook's privacy features.

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.

pyre3• 14 years ago

  | This is just handing people another tool - the uses,
  | and misuses, of said tool are entirely on the users.

The same applies to building hand-held nuclear weapons and handing them out on a street corner.

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.

I see it more as Mark Zuckerberg having lived a rather sheltered life. E.g., his view that people having different 'faces' with different people as being disingenuous is laughable. Many people only show selected parts of themselves to certain peer groups, while showing other parts to different peer groups.

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).

GuiA2• 14 years ago

>A snarky and mean-spirited stereotyping of all nerds as socially inept! How clever.

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.

CoffeeDregs• 14 years ago

Wow. When Graph Searches were announced, I thought "meh, I'm tired of FB...". I never thought to explore what Graph Searches actually meant. And I would never have done so or will do so, but I'm very glad that someone has investigated the system.

>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?

corporalagumbo22• 14 years ago

Zuckerberg thinks people complain about privacy because they're old-fashioned and scared of the future. He thinks in the future we're all going to be extremely open, share shit all the time, aaaand basically the whole world is going to be one big chat room where people don't really hide things any more.

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.

OGC• 14 years ago

> 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?

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.

achompas6• 14 years ago

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?

derleth3• 14 years ago

> If you don't like it, then quit.

Assuming you're socially allowed to quit Facebook.

joe_the_user• 14 years ago

"Is Graph Search really that shocking to you--to anyone on HN?"

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."

mosselman2• 14 years ago

It is obvious that you either didn't read the search queries on the linked page, or you don't understand the impact that some of these queries can have on peoples' lives.

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...

varjag• 14 years ago

> Users identified by Graph Search have public accounts and have willingly entered personal information into Facebook.

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.

mark_integerdsv8• 14 years ago

If you fail to see the danger that a tool with the ability to search a network for such things as "Islamic men interested in other men, living in Tehran," a tool that can then display their place of work or other contact details (that they may have willingly ((yet unwittingly)) entered), in the hands of bullies, bigots or oppressive regimes then personally I feel you are similarly limited in your world experience to what the grandparent poster is accusing Zuckerberg of being.

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.

sebcat2• 14 years ago

"If you don't like it, then quit"

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

sebcat2• 14 years ago

"If you don't like it, then quit"

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.

veemjeem• 14 years ago

I'm surprised nobody has invoked godwin's law yet; ie searching for "Nazis who live in California".

electic2• 14 years ago

This is bad news all around. It is likely a huge percentage of searches performed by people will not enrich lives but most people will use it to mine out insights that others don't wish to be publicized.

Can you imagine people being rounded up in China over this and put into prisons over their "like".

fletchowns2• 14 years ago

You don't even have to imagine, it's already happened.

thefreeman• 14 years ago

Do you have a link with more information?

unreal37• 14 years ago

They don't have Facebook in the Great Firewall of China.

And if they DID, people there wouldn't be liking Falun Gong. It's a bogus example.

leoc2• 14 years ago

> 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.

crdoconnor• 14 years ago

It's a search for people who have family members in China. Not people in China.

leoc2• 14 years ago

Prison? That might not be the worst of it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilgour-Matas_report

______• 14 years ago

It's ironic -- the "anonymization" technique of pixelating the image and blanking the names doesn't really work anymore: one can easily just search by the other attributes to find the people again, there is enough entropy in that data.

corporalagumbo22• 14 years ago

That's true. I do consider it polite though not to display their names openly on the site. It gives these people a chance to change their preferences and hide from future searches for instance.

Interesting concept... showing courtesy for strangers you find in search results...

notatoad2• 14 years ago

The whole point of the site (other than lulz) is to highlight the privacy problems of Facebook, they obviously aren't going to completely protect the people who show up in those searches. What the blurring does is prevents the top 3-4 people in the results at the time of the search from being unfairly highlighted, and it doesn't keep any historical record of the people should they take steps to remove themselves from these results.

I think the anonymization, while not perfect, is enough to be considered ethical.

dmcy22• 14 years ago

At first glance, it almost seems as if they turned the various segmenting functions in Facebook ads into Graph Search. Except you can now see in much more detail who those people actually are.

JimWillTri• 14 years ago

It's a good thing I always used alias' with Facebook.

notatoad2• 14 years ago

If they ever catch you at that, they'll delete your account. And they will quiz your friends to find out if your name is real or not: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/09/24/facebook-...

tlrobinson4• 14 years ago

Short term this may be a problem, but long term it's probably a good thing. Hopefully once people become aware of what they're exposing they'll become more cautious.

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.

misiti3780• 14 years ago

spot on!

troymc2• 14 years ago

While it's (probably) true that the information is already available, it's not easily available.

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.

Aissen• 14 years ago

By 25 days of profile reading, I think you mean 2 days of writing a scraper and 10 days of tuning it? The rest being spent letting it run, reading hacker news, reddit, and your friends' facebook updates.

tlrobinson4• 14 years ago

You might not do it, but the organizations with resources and power to actually harm you certainly could.

flyinRyan7• 14 years ago

> is basically saying you're ok with "security through obscurity".

You already said you were ok with "security through obscurity" when you logged in with a password.

tlrobinson4• 14 years ago

Huh? Passwords aren't considered "security through obscurity".

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4486171/isnt-a-password-a...

msoad• 14 years ago

> “Islamic men interested in men who live in Tehran, Iran“

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)

joshschreuder• 14 years ago

I thought as much by the fact that all shown marked 'interested in men and women'

camus2• 14 years ago

Iranians perfectly know what is homosexuality and some practice it in secret , they are not dumb , they just dont talk about it for obvious reasons.

notahacker2• 14 years ago

Knowing what homosexuality is =/= assuming the purpose of an innocuous-sounding phrase like "Interested in" is intended as a declaration of homosexuality, especially if you're living in an environment where you can't see why anyone would conceivably want to publicly declare it.

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.

oh_sigh6• 14 years ago

"Interested in" doesn't imply "sexually attracted to". If you are interested in creating friendships with men, they you will mark "Interested in men"

aaronbrethorst• 14 years ago

Apple Inc Employees Who Like Android: https://www.facebook.com/search/103818329656399/likers/13794...

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...

mseebach3• 14 years ago

The semantics of "like", especially in the context where you "like" an organisation, has changed to "follows" or "subscribes to".

corporalagumbo22• 14 years ago

Maybe this seems horrible right now, but Facebook didn't create these problems and contradictions, it just exposed them uncomfortably. I expect that the eventual abuses springing from this exposure will spur a counterreaction, hopefully with net-positive results. After all, what's the most meaningful take-away from this? Is it that Facebook is endangering individuals? Not really. Powerful, global social search tools like this were bound to happen eventually. The potential benefits of integrative technologies like this are just too great to ignore. No, the real take-away is this: sexual freedoms suck in Iran. Religious freedoms suck in China. And lots of people have embarrassing and/or contradictory and/or naive views and tastes.

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.

lhnn2• 14 years ago

> And lots of people have embarrassing and/or contradictory and/or naive views and tastes.

That they should be keeping off the Internet.

corporalagumbo22• 14 years ago

Come on, don't be so harsh. Everyone has room to improve.

politician• 14 years ago

And "Girls who are single and nearby and like getting drunk"... What noble redeeming value do you find in that search?

corporalagumbo22• 14 years ago

Increasing the efficiency of people's sex lives?

flyinRyan7• 14 years ago

> Is it that Facebook is endangering individuals? Not really.

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?

Dirlewanger• 14 years ago

>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.

miw-sec-work• 14 years ago

If this isn't a good enough reason to GET THE HELL OFF FACEBOOK then you wont be convinced otherwise.

GET THE HELL OFF FACEBOOK!

veb2• 14 years ago

or simply change your habits online. there's absolutely no need to have "I like to get drunk and party" on your Facebook page if you're worried that people will see that.

jliptzin• 14 years ago

Well put CC

veb2• 14 years ago

I wonder how many of these would be a joke though...

artmageddon• 14 years ago

I don't know if it's enough, but I just removed nearly any interest that I liked "i.e. removed snowboarding, hip-hop', etc. along with other stuff that's just promotional fluff. I may not be able to avoid the social graph altogether but I'd like to limit the kind of searches I appear in.

bane• 14 years ago

I think it's obvious that this is really a way of advertising FB's advertising possibilities, opening it up to the general public is a side-effect of building revenue generation tools.

But FB will definitely have to roll a great deal of this back as this is definitely deeply troubling.

m22• 14 years ago

If they don't roll it back then this will simply encourage users to bump up their privacy, or even remove their details from their profiles.

brianchu• 14 years ago

Contrary to what a lot of people think, you can change the visibility of likes. This affects Graph Search, Timeline visibility, and also page visibility (I've personally tested these). The Admins of pages you like will still be able to see that you like their page.

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).

beatpanda3• 14 years ago

I appreciate the information, but this misses the point. Facebook hides privacy settings because privacy is bad for their business objectives, and most people will never bother to dig for these settings, leaving them open to the kinds of attacks demonstrated by the original post.

hamax• 14 years ago

> Facebook hides privacy settings

I have a direct link to privacy settings in the header. I don't know how can they make it more visible.

baddox• 14 years ago

Or perhaps because not many people are going to want to individually set the visibility of likes, and displaying it more prominently would be a usability nightmare.

driverdan2• 14 years ago

Or perhaps don't like things you don't want other people to know about? Seems like the simplest solution.

Aloisius2• 14 years ago

Yes, but one of those searches was for family members of people who supported the Falun Gong. You may live in the US, be a member of the Falun Gong and your grandparents in China get picked up and shipped off for suspected support.

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.

Apocryphon2• 14 years ago

I see this as similar to those shady websites that scrape for personal information, then aggregate them. Not the shadiness, but the same principle of gathering information that has already been available, but now simply exposing it in one neat package. And it's very frightening. Can you imagine in a few years where scrapers can take this kind of logic and build databases of people's "online footprints" based on aliases they have used in the past by searching for references to emails they registered with, or mentioned in comments? Add textual analysis of their comments, and all bets are off.

achompas6• 14 years ago

Those "online footprint" type of websites already exist, and they're very popular with due diligence firms.

Apocryphon2• 14 years ago

Do they actually go as far as log aliases and pseudonyms? People often reuse screen names more than they do passwords.

sideproject• 14 years ago

Not sure what would happen in the long term, but at least in the short term, I can see a lot of people start removing their personal data from Facebook when this gets released...

ElissaShevinsky2• 14 years ago

This is a headache to do (could someone build an app to make this easier?) but I'm putting this into my personal task list for next week.

angersock3• 14 years ago

Well, the consumers wanted it, right?

Props to giving the people what they want!

(also for having such wonderful inventory management!)

maaku• 14 years ago

I didn't ask for it.

flyinRyan7• 14 years ago

The consumers would be those who pay money: i.e. advertisers.

rogerchucker7• 14 years ago

Are you intentionally being dense? Where is the data that showed "consumers wanted it"?

angersock3• 14 years ago

I don't have it, but I assume you could look for people that "like" the Graph feature on Facebook. :)

rdl• 14 years ago

People "who work at technology companies" and "like destroying billions of dollars in FB market capitalization". :)

matthew-wegner• 14 years ago

You've always been able to target people like this via their advertising tools. Want to sell the Cookie Diet to single women, 35-45, who like "Dieting" and "Oreo's"?

mcphilip• 14 years ago

I'm willing to bet that APIs will eventually expose searching the text of posts, not just "Likes". Sure, it'll be introduced with examples of better ways to find people with common interests, but inevitably it'll expose even privacy protected posts to bad actors (e.g. Big Brother Police State, Ad companies who pay a premium, etc).

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.

beatpanda3• 14 years ago

The notion that the government doesn't already have access to all that data is absurd. Facebook has shown an eagerness to cooperate with governments and law enforcement in the past and I would be extremely surprised to learn that they're not already selling or giving away data to government for large-scale data mining operations.

MrMan• 14 years ago

I am scared to death of FaceBook and Graph Search is the last straw I am immediately deactivating my account.

crowhack3• 14 years ago

Just did the same. I've had enough of being used.

onedev• 14 years ago

You realize graph search only utilizes information that YOU make available.

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".

ladzoppelin• 14 years ago

It completely blows my mind. I am totally confused as to what Facebook does for people for them to take this stuff on a monthly basis. As for this new search: What happens when people pop up on this search even when they have nothing in common with the question being asked? I really might my family to deactivate for a while at least until this thing is better understood.

batiudrami2• 14 years ago

Events and photo sharing. No other service has enough of my friends on it to be an event planning service. Email doesn't cut it as there's no collaboration at all (and I don't even have most of their email addresses!).

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.

VeejayRampay2• 14 years ago

Oh by the way, just a reminder, Facebook also creates likes on your behalf to generate engagement.

http://readwrite.com/2012/12/11/why-are-dead-people-liking-s...

clobber• 14 years ago

Creepy doesn't begin to describe facebook anymore.

gonehome• 14 years ago

This doesn't change much, the established facebook brand and etiquette is that it's used to communicate with friends. This is also the situation that Mark said they're targeting in his startup talk a few months ago.

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.

rogerchucker7• 14 years ago

This sorta proves what I have been saying about Graph Search. Its biggest and most prominent use cases will be fancy but useless searches of people. Unfortunately some of those searches will lead to new headaches.

rogerchucker7• 14 years ago

Just realized that Graph Search is a great tool to aggregate homosexuals in any area - "Men who live nearby and are interested in men" (or replace "men" with "women"). Great tool for taking homophobia to a whole new level. One can of course argue that liberal groups can use this information for an opposite purpose.

drivebyacct22• 14 years ago

This is sort of a weird assumption to leap too. Would "People who like the page Black People" also be targeted? Would Republicans target people who are marked as "liberal"? Or maybe I'm overly optimistic about homophobic people being either dumb enough or unmotivated enough to do such a thing.

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.

tommorris2• 14 years ago

Finally, a way to find single gay dudes who dig MongoDB... ;-)

tommorris2• 14 years ago

Grindr already exists...

rogerchucker7• 14 years ago

And oh.. you want some potential cheating women (or men)? Try "Married women who like Ashley Madison"... ;)

ElissaShevinsky2• 14 years ago

We need to be careful not to read too much into this data without context. "Liking" a fan page used to be a much lighter thing before the FB interest graph became interwoven into other applications & this new search feature.

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.

rogerchucker7• 14 years ago

Not sure if you tried the search string. "More than 100 people" were returned on this and most of them in the top results were indeed employed elsewhere.

MartinCron• 14 years ago

Once people start to realize that "liking" something is a fundamentally public act, this should be less of a problem. There's a huge difference between being a person "who likes Ashley Madison" (which I am not) and being a person "who has made a public declaration of liking Ashley Madison" (which I am also not).

Or, to be even more reductive: public declarations are public.

abava• 14 years ago

answers depend on the accuracy in users profiles. Btw, you can try this simple search in your social circle: http://servletsuite.com/fbdir

dhruvbhatia• 14 years ago

Can't read the entire search phrase on an iPhone. Please consider using text wrapping.

acchow• 14 years ago

So it turns out Graph Search is not at all what I thought it was. I thought it would infer information about people that they did not explicitly type in (inferred semantics) to complete my search. In actuality, it looks like a GUI for SQL.

VeejayRampay2• 14 years ago

Combine the extremely creepy Graph Search and http://readwrite.com/2012/12/11/why-are-dead-people-liking-s... and you've got yourself a pretty interesting situation. The possibilities for ruining people's lives are just endless.

return02• 14 years ago

The searches depicted are more telling about the person making the search rather than the supposed "victims". Nothing to see here, unless you buy into stereotypical fearmongering or are "shocked" that humans are human.

kevingadd• 14 years ago

You don't seem to understand the power information has over people's lives. Have you ever disclosed information to some of your friends that you wouldn't disclose to the general public? What about information that could get you arrested or executed? This is real.

return02• 14 years ago

A real dangerous person cannot be so dumb, by definition. This is just sensationalism.

elorant• 14 years ago

I wonder guys working at Facebood don't realize that a service like that may end in their demise? If people begin to understand that the activity they're declaring online can be used against them, or to put it mildly to identify them in ways they might not want, they will stop using the damn site.

ohwp• 14 years ago

This only shows a lot of people take data without context as "truth".

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.

Buzaga• 14 years ago

everyone judges.. if potential employees, bullies, potential clients find the guy in something like this there's damage already...

BigBalli• 14 years ago

You can find a good collection of related links here: http://giacomoballi.com/2013/01/everything-you-need-to-know-...

lukev• 14 years ago

I don't use facebook myself (have an account, but never touch it) so I'm a bit confused about one thing.

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?

mark_integerdsv8• 14 years ago

Personally, I don't doubt that people with questionable shared interests have made contact with one another through FB.

World's a weird place at times. The Internet kind of dilates the portal into those spaces.

pclark• 14 years ago

I believe a lot of these are when the interests box were free form, and people put all kinds of junk in it - then Facebook converted these fields into structured data and auto liked all these pages.

lubos• 14 years ago

looking at these graph searches, now I finally understand why Zuckerberg called his users "dumb fucks"

some23• 13 years ago

There are a lot of nonsensical suggestions

http://codingplayground.blogspot.it/2013/01/facebook-graph-s...

Actual Facebook Graph Searches

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