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I blogged a little about this at the end of February after playing with the new Graph Search bar. I think when it's finally rolled out a lot of people are going
by iamben 14y ago
I blogged a little about this at the end of February after playing with the new Graph Search bar. I think when it's finally rolled out a lot of people are going to be surprised at the searches they're turning up in - it's incredibly easy to find people (friends, friends of friends, randoms) by their religion, political leanings, potentially objectionable activities (hunting, fighting, etc) etc.
- aeturnum 14y agoIf I understand it correctly, Graph Search uses only directly disclosed data. If you're searching for, say, Christians you'll only get people who list "Christian" in their profile. Facebook isn't doing statistical analysis to find people who don't list themselves as Christians, but are "probably" Christian. I see that as a lot less troubling, mostly because it's much easier to understand what you do and don't write in your profile v.s. the unconscious patterns in your behavior.
- jrabone 14y agoI thought I'd seen "Friends of Christians who like...", "Spouses of friends of Christians who like..." which does a lot of the legwork for you in terms of inferences. The problem with Graph Search is, well, it's a graph; I suspect many people are slightly surprised by graph theoretic results - Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon et al.
- aeturnum 14y agoI think it'll wake a lot of people up to the information they're giving out to friends, but I think it's a very different thing than what this article outlines.
- iamben 14y agoYeah, you're right. But I still think there are going to be a lot of people surprised at what they're directly disclosing - I doubt my mum, for instance, who will never have adjusted her privacy settings, understands how much people can glean from her profile.