33 ms·

Actual Facebook Graph Searches

509 points by ig1 14y ago

harlanlewis 14y 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&Template=/ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=132904 http://www.ala.org/Template.cfm?Section=interpretations&...
- stephengillie 14y 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 14y ago
    Best to just set it up so "Only you" can see your own likes. http://abrax.us/Facebook/EditLikes.php http://abrax.us/Facebook/EditLikes.php
    - Aloisius 14y ago
      Will that prevent your family showing up when they search for family members who like something? Or just prevent you from showing up with your own likes visible?
  - kefs 14y ago
    Exfoliate for Android (which stopped working for me after timeline, but i haven't retried since) http://www.exfoliateapp.com/ http://www.exfoliateapp.com/ https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.worb.android.exfoliate https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.worb.andro...
aviswanathan 14y 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.
psbp 14y ago
Goodbye Facebook.
- jgalt212 14y ago
  +1 to that.
- corporalagumbo 14y ago
  Haven't heard that one before...
  - rogerchucker 14y ago
    You need to take a break from your Facebook apologism. It's getting cartoonish.
    - corporalagumbo 14y ago
      If you say so.
GuiA 14y 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.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- psbp 14y 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.
- corporalagumbo 14y 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 14y ago
    Try an Amazon account which is shared with family members. Amazon thinks I like electronics, Hello Kitty and bows.
electic 14y 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".
- fletchowns 14y ago
  You don't even have to imagine, it's already happened.
  - thefreeman 14y ago
    Do you have a link with more information?
    - fletchowns 14y ago
      http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/11/19/indian-woman-arrested-over-facebook-like/ http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/11/19/indian-woman-arrested-ov...
      - electic 14y ago
        That's true. Forgot about that case. I guess cases like this will explode in frequency.
- unreal37 14y 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.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - leoc 14y 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.
______ 14y 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.
- corporalagumbo 14y 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...
- notatoad 14y 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 14y 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 14y ago
It's a good thing I always used alias' with Facebook.
- notatoad 14y 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-stops-asking-users-to-snitch-on-friends-with-fake-names/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/09/24/facebook-...
tlrobinson 14y 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 14y ago
  spot on!
- troymc 14y 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 14y 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.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - troymc 14y ago
      Facebook doesn't let any random bot crawl Facebook with scrapers. If you go to: https://www.facebook.com/robots.txt https://www.facebook.com/robots.txt it says: # Notice: if you would like to crawl Facebook you can # contact us here: http://www.facebook.com/apps/site_scraping_tos.php http://www.facebook.com/apps/site_scraping_tos.php # to apply for white listing. Our general terms are available # at http://www.facebook.com/apps/site_scraping_tos_terms.php http://www.facebook.com/apps/site_scraping_tos_terms.php (Then there's a bunch of "Disallow:" statements for Baidu, Google, etc.) If you follow the link, you can apply to Facebook for permission to do "automated data collection." Even if you do get permission, Facebook is very restrictive with what you're allowed to do with the scraped data.
msoad 14y 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)
- camus 14y 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.
  - notahacker 14y 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.
    - camus 14y ago
      you are insulting them saying they cant even understand plain english, you dont have to live in USA to understand what "interested in" mean in that context , there is nothing innocent sounding in that expresssion, and i'm not english nor have an english culture. Dont take aliens for fools.
      - notahacker 14y ago
        I'll give you a relevant example: Back in ~2006 it was possible to do similar searches within your college. A disproportionately large number of people declaring their interest in both men and women were from China. Now it's possible that Chinese students were much more likely to be [openly] bisexual than British and European ones, but every shred of evidence I've ever seen (at college, in the media and living in a relatively-liberal ethnically Chinese country) points to the opposite.
aaronbrethorst 14y ago
Apple Inc Employees Who Like Android: https://www.facebook.com/search/103818329656399/likers/137947732957611/employees/intersect https://www.facebook.com/search/103818329656399/likers/13794... People who like Barack Obama and Mitt Romney: https://www.facebook.com/search/6815841748/likers/21392801120/likers/intersect https://www.facebook.com/search/6815841748/likers/2139280112... People who like MPAA and The Pirate Bay: https://www.facebook.com/search/108476252505746/likers/111011882256402/likers/intersect https://www.facebook.com/search/108476252505746/likers/11101...
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- mseebach 14y ago
  The semantics of "like", especially in the context where you "like" an organisation, has changed to "follows" or "subscribes to".
corporalagumbo 14y 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.
- lhnn 14y ago
  > And lots of people have embarrassing and/or contradictory and/or naive views and tastes. That they should be keeping off the Internet.
  - corporalagumbo 14y ago
    Come on, don't be so harsh. Everyone has room to improve.
    - lhnn 14y ago
      I'm not saying people shouldn't have X view, I'm saying today that they should know that posting, liking on facebook, etc. are equivalents of shouting it from the rooftop. I could have expressed myself more carefully.
- politician 14y ago
  And "Girls who are single and nearby and like getting drunk"... What noble redeeming value do you find in that search?
miw-sec-work 14y 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!
- veb 14y 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 14y ago
  Well put CC
veb 14y ago
I wonder how many of these would be a joke though...
artmageddon 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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).
- beatpanda 14y 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 14y 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.
    - beatpanda 14y ago
      Chart me a path from the privacy settings dialog in the header to changing the visibility of individual "likes", such that the average user can prepare to hide from random strangers when Open Graph Search goes public. I dare you.
      - josteink 14y ago
        > Chart me a path from the privacy settings dialog in the header to changing the visibility of individual "likes", And if he manages to do that, ask him to chart one which will be valid 2 months from now. They keep changing that shit. Keeping up to speed is just a completely overwhelming sort of task which even most people who care about privacy wont have the stamina to do.
Apocryphon 14y 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.
- achompas 14y ago
  Those "online footprint" type of websites already exist, and they're very popular with due diligence firms.
  - Apocryphon 14y ago
    Do they actually go as far as log aliases and pseudonyms? People often reuse screen names more than they do passwords.
    - aw3c2 14y ago
      yes, that was exposed a couple of weeks ago. I cannot remember any searchable terms from the post or I would link.
    - achompas 14y ago
      No, as far as I can recall.
sideproject 14y 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...
- ElissaShevinsky 14y 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.
angersock 14y ago
Well, the consumers wanted it, right? Props to giving the people what they want! (also for having such wonderful inventory management!)
- maaku 14y ago
  I didn't ask for it.
  - flyinRyan 14y ago
    The consumers would be those who pay money: i.e. advertisers.
    - angersock 14y ago
      Hence my comment about inventory management. Moooooo.
- rogerchucker 14y ago
  Are you intentionally being dense? Where is the data that showed "consumers wanted it"?
  - angersock 14y ago
    I don't have it, but I assume you could look for people that "like" the Graph feature on Facebook. :)
    - rogerchucker 14y ago
      That doesn't indicate that a significant number of Facebook users "wanted" it.
rdl 14y ago
People "who work at technology companies" and "like destroying billions of dollars in FB market capitalization". :)
matthew-wegner 14y 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 14y 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.
- beatpanda 14y 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 14y ago
I am scared to death of FaceBook and Graph Search is the last straw I am immediately deactivating my account.
- crowhack 14y ago
  Just did the same. I've had enough of being used.
  - onedev 14y 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".
    - crowhack 14y ago
      Yes I do but when I joined facebook I didn't realize they would create a super search engine to easily sort and categorize all of their users' data for more efficient targeted advertising. They sell likes, they have my friends sponsor ads they've never sponsored, they used 5 of my friends pictures to try to manipulate me into not deleting my account. We aren't their main customer but are there just to be targeted. Sounds like we are being used. This graph search is just the last straw. It is terrifying the repercussions this search engine could have, and I believe this blog post shows some great examples.
      - Mahn 14y ago
        So you are arguing that you made something public on facebook, but you didn't expect it to be that public? It looks like people who reject/don't use facebook due to privacy concerns do so because they don't understand the implications of what they put there. Personally, if I were to be concerned about privacy, I'd just make some research to understand what is and isn't public and how to use the product overall, but I suppose one could be pissed off at facebook for not being clearer about who can or could see what you put in there (even though they constantly try to improve this). Either way, the argument "I don't use facebook because I'm concerned about the data they extract from me" is flawed and irrational, because facebook won't know anything you don't explicitly tell to it. I still hear that argument from some people every now and then and I can't help but think that they just don't understand and did not want to make an effort in understanding facebook.
clobber 14y ago
Creepy doesn't begin to describe facebook anymore.
fossuser 14y 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.
rogerchucker 14y 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.
rogerchucker 14y 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.
- drivebyacct2 14y 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.
  - tommorris 14y ago
    Finally, a way to find single gay dudes who dig MongoDB... ;-)
- tommorris 14y ago
  Grindr already exists...
rogerchucker 14y ago
And oh.. you want some potential cheating women (or men)? Try "Married women who like Ashley Madison"... ;)
- ElissaShevinsky 14y 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.
  - rogerchucker 14y 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 14y 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 14y ago
answers depend on the accuracy in users profiles. Btw, you can try this simple search in your social circle: http://servletsuite.com/fbdir http://servletsuite.com/fbdir
dhruvbhatia 14y ago
Can't read the entire search phrase on an iPhone. Please consider using text wrapping.
acchow 14y 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.
VeejayRampay 14y ago
Combine the extremely creepy Graph Search and http://readwrite.com/2012/12/11/why-are-dead-people-liking-stuff-on-facebook 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.
return0 14y 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 14y 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.
  - return0 14y ago
    A real dangerous person cannot be so dumb, by definition. This is just sensationalism.
timrpeterson 14y ago
I FUCKING HATE FACEBOOK AND THEIR WORLD-OBLITERATING WEBSITE. PLEASE MAKE IT STOP.
elorant 14y 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 14y 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 14y ago
  everyone judges.. if potential employees, bullies, potential clients find the guy in something like this there's damage already...
BigBalli 14y ago
You can find a good collection of related links here: http://giacomoballi.com/2013/01/everything-you-need-to-know-about-facebook-graph-search/ http://giacomoballi.com/2013/01/everything-you-need-to-know-...
lukev 14y 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_integerdsv 14y 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 14y 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 14y ago
looking at these graph searches, now I finally understand why Zuckerberg called his users "dumb fucks"
some23 14y ago
There are a lot of nonsensical suggestions http://codingplayground.blogspot.it/2013/01/facebook-graph-search-and-synthetic.html http://codingplayground.blogspot.it/2013/01/facebook-graph-s...

509 points by ig1 14y 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&Template=/ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=132904 http://www.ala.org/Template.cfm?Section=interpretations&...

stephengillie 14y 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 14y ago
  Best to just set it up so "Only you" can see your own likes. http://abrax.us/Facebook/EditLikes.php http://abrax.us/Facebook/EditLikes.php
  - Aloisius 14y ago
    Will that prevent your family showing up when they search for family members who like something? Or just prevent you from showing up with your own likes visible?
- kefs 14y ago
  Exfoliate for Android (which stopped working for me after timeline, but i haven't retried since) http://www.exfoliateapp.com/ http://www.exfoliateapp.com/ https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.worb.android.exfoliate https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.worb.andro...

aviswanathan 14y 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.

psbp 14y ago

Goodbye Facebook.

jgalt212 14y ago
+1 to that.
corporalagumbo 14y ago
Haven't heard that one before...
- rogerchucker 14y ago
  You need to take a break from your Facebook apologism. It's getting cartoonish.
  - corporalagumbo 14y ago
    If you say so.

GuiA 14y 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.

deleted 14y ago
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psbp 14y 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.
corporalagumbo 14y 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 14y ago
  Try an Amazon account which is shared with family members. Amazon thinks I like electronics, Hello Kitty and bows.

electic 14y 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".

fletchowns 14y ago
You don't even have to imagine, it's already happened.
- thefreeman 14y ago
  Do you have a link with more information?
  - fletchowns 14y ago
    http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/11/19/indian-woman-arrested-over-facebook-like/ http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/11/19/indian-woman-arrested-ov...
    - electic 14y ago
      That's true. Forgot about that case. I guess cases like this will explode in frequency.
unreal37 14y 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.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- leoc 14y 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.

______ 14y 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.

corporalagumbo 14y 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...
notatoad 14y 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 14y 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 14y ago

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

notatoad 14y 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-stops-asking-users-to-snitch-on-friends-with-fake-names/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/09/24/facebook-...

tlrobinson 14y 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 14y ago
spot on!
troymc 14y 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 14y 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.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - troymc 14y ago
    Facebook doesn't let any random bot crawl Facebook with scrapers. If you go to: https://www.facebook.com/robots.txt https://www.facebook.com/robots.txt it says: # Notice: if you would like to crawl Facebook you can # contact us here: http://www.facebook.com/apps/site_scraping_tos.php http://www.facebook.com/apps/site_scraping_tos.php # to apply for white listing. Our general terms are available # at http://www.facebook.com/apps/site_scraping_tos_terms.php http://www.facebook.com/apps/site_scraping_tos_terms.php (Then there's a bunch of "Disallow:" statements for Baidu, Google, etc.) If you follow the link, you can apply to Facebook for permission to do "automated data collection." Even if you do get permission, Facebook is very restrictive with what you're allowed to do with the scraped data.

msoad 14y 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)

camus 14y 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.
- notahacker 14y 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.
  - camus 14y ago
    you are insulting them saying they cant even understand plain english, you dont have to live in USA to understand what "interested in" mean in that context , there is nothing innocent sounding in that expresssion, and i'm not english nor have an english culture. Dont take aliens for fools.
    - notahacker 14y ago
      I'll give you a relevant example: Back in ~2006 it was possible to do similar searches within your college. A disproportionately large number of people declaring their interest in both men and women were from China. Now it's possible that Chinese students were much more likely to be [openly] bisexual than British and European ones, but every shred of evidence I've ever seen (at college, in the media and living in a relatively-liberal ethnically Chinese country) points to the opposite.

aaronbrethorst 14y ago

Apple Inc Employees Who Like Android: https://www.facebook.com/search/103818329656399/likers/137947732957611/employees/intersect https://www.facebook.com/search/103818329656399/likers/13794... People who like Barack Obama and Mitt Romney: https://www.facebook.com/search/6815841748/likers/21392801120/likers/intersect https://www.facebook.com/search/6815841748/likers/2139280112... People who like MPAA and The Pirate Bay: https://www.facebook.com/search/108476252505746/likers/111011882256402/likers/intersect https://www.facebook.com/search/108476252505746/likers/11101...

deleted 14y ago
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mseebach 14y ago
The semantics of "like", especially in the context where you "like" an organisation, has changed to "follows" or "subscribes to".

corporalagumbo 14y 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.

lhnn 14y ago
> And lots of people have embarrassing and/or contradictory and/or naive views and tastes. That they should be keeping off the Internet.
- corporalagumbo 14y ago
  Come on, don't be so harsh. Everyone has room to improve.
  - lhnn 14y ago
    I'm not saying people shouldn't have X view, I'm saying today that they should know that posting, liking on facebook, etc. are equivalents of shouting it from the rooftop. I could have expressed myself more carefully.
politician 14y ago
And "Girls who are single and nearby and like getting drunk"... What noble redeeming value do you find in that search?

miw-sec-work 14y 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!

veb 14y 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 14y ago
Well put CC

veb 14y ago

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

artmageddon 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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).

beatpanda 14y 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 14y 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.
  - beatpanda 14y ago
    Chart me a path from the privacy settings dialog in the header to changing the visibility of individual "likes", such that the average user can prepare to hide from random strangers when Open Graph Search goes public. I dare you.
    - josteink 14y ago
      > Chart me a path from the privacy settings dialog in the header to changing the visibility of individual "likes", And if he manages to do that, ask him to chart one which will be valid 2 months from now. They keep changing that shit. Keeping up to speed is just a completely overwhelming sort of task which even most people who care about privacy wont have the stamina to do.

Apocryphon 14y 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.

achompas 14y ago
Those "online footprint" type of websites already exist, and they're very popular with due diligence firms.
- Apocryphon 14y ago
  Do they actually go as far as log aliases and pseudonyms? People often reuse screen names more than they do passwords.
  - aw3c2 14y ago
    yes, that was exposed a couple of weeks ago. I cannot remember any searchable terms from the post or I would link.
  - achompas 14y ago
    No, as far as I can recall.

sideproject 14y 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...

ElissaShevinsky 14y 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.

angersock 14y ago

Well, the consumers wanted it, right? Props to giving the people what they want! (also for having such wonderful inventory management!)

maaku 14y ago
I didn't ask for it.
- flyinRyan 14y ago
  The consumers would be those who pay money: i.e. advertisers.
  - angersock 14y ago
    Hence my comment about inventory management. Moooooo.
rogerchucker 14y ago
Are you intentionally being dense? Where is the data that showed "consumers wanted it"?
- angersock 14y ago
  I don't have it, but I assume you could look for people that "like" the Graph feature on Facebook. :)
  - rogerchucker 14y ago
    That doesn't indicate that a significant number of Facebook users "wanted" it.

rdl 14y ago

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

matthew-wegner 14y 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 14y 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.

beatpanda 14y 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 14y ago

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

crowhack 14y ago
Just did the same. I've had enough of being used.
- onedev 14y 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".
  - crowhack 14y ago
    Yes I do but when I joined facebook I didn't realize they would create a super search engine to easily sort and categorize all of their users' data for more efficient targeted advertising. They sell likes, they have my friends sponsor ads they've never sponsored, they used 5 of my friends pictures to try to manipulate me into not deleting my account. We aren't their main customer but are there just to be targeted. Sounds like we are being used. This graph search is just the last straw. It is terrifying the repercussions this search engine could have, and I believe this blog post shows some great examples.
    - Mahn 14y ago
      So you are arguing that you made something public on facebook, but you didn't expect it to be that public? It looks like people who reject/don't use facebook due to privacy concerns do so because they don't understand the implications of what they put there. Personally, if I were to be concerned about privacy, I'd just make some research to understand what is and isn't public and how to use the product overall, but I suppose one could be pissed off at facebook for not being clearer about who can or could see what you put in there (even though they constantly try to improve this). Either way, the argument "I don't use facebook because I'm concerned about the data they extract from me" is flawed and irrational, because facebook won't know anything you don't explicitly tell to it. I still hear that argument from some people every now and then and I can't help but think that they just don't understand and did not want to make an effort in understanding facebook.

clobber 14y ago

Creepy doesn't begin to describe facebook anymore.

fossuser 14y 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.

rogerchucker 14y 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.

rogerchucker 14y 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.

drivebyacct2 14y 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.
- tommorris 14y ago
  Finally, a way to find single gay dudes who dig MongoDB... ;-)
tommorris 14y ago
Grindr already exists...

rogerchucker 14y ago

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

ElissaShevinsky 14y 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.
- rogerchucker 14y 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 14y 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 14y ago

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

dhruvbhatia 14y ago

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

acchow 14y 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.

VeejayRampay 14y ago

Combine the extremely creepy Graph Search and http://readwrite.com/2012/12/11/why-are-dead-people-liking-stuff-on-facebook 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.

return0 14y 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 14y 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.
- return0 14y ago
  A real dangerous person cannot be so dumb, by definition. This is just sensationalism.

timrpeterson 14y ago

I FUCKING HATE FACEBOOK AND THEIR WORLD-OBLITERATING WEBSITE. PLEASE MAKE IT STOP.

elorant 14y 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 14y 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 14y ago
everyone judges.. if potential employees, bullies, potential clients find the guy in something like this there's damage already...

BigBalli 14y ago

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

lukev 14y 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_integerdsv 14y 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 14y 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 14y ago

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

some23 14y ago

There are a lot of nonsensical suggestions http://codingplayground.blogspot.it/2013/01/facebook-graph-search-and-synthetic.html http://codingplayground.blogspot.it/2013/01/facebook-graph-s...