[deleted]
The Creepy Details of Facebook's New Graph Search
31–39 of 39 posts
Re: The Creepy Details of Facebook's New Graph Search
#32Wasn't it Assange that said fb was the greatest spying machine ever invented? Why the heck people will continuously give away private information with no safeguard that information will ever remain private in the future, I will never understand. Graph Search is just one more example of 'transparency creep' until there is only a microcosm of privacy left, and even that will likely be an illusion.
Re: The Creepy Details of Facebook's New Graph Search
#33This at least exposes what you could have been doing all along using their API. If anything it is better that they launch this and people realize the implications rather than developers being able to do it without people really understanding the implications.
And how the law will use it. Seems like a great way to find criminals and activists at scale
I find it creepy that our impression of the government now has us lumping criminals and activists into the same sentence and thought.
Re: The Creepy Details of Facebook's New Graph Search
#34Think about what this will do for discriminatory hiring. Searches on who has liked political statements or views that are disapproved of by corporate policy. Again as others have state - big difference between this stuff being discoverable and it being easily searched, sliced and diced.
What's the big difference other than smaller players having access to this information?
Maybe I'm going to far applying computer security concepts to real life but this was possible before, so making it easier to access only really changes how educated the users are about over-sharing. I mean, if you wanted to educate people in a "wow that's creepy" way like firesheep did you would build something like this.
If you shared it online and it's linked to your real name then you have to assume anyone can get a hold of it.
In the practical world you make an excellent point about discriminatory hiring, but I feel like this was going to happen anyway so better to open things up now and hopefully scare people into realizing what they are doing when they post private information publicly. The longer the time until this happens, the worse it will be when it does right?
Re: The Creepy Details of Facebook's New Graph Search
#35Think about what this will do for discriminatory hiring. Searches on who has liked political statements or views that are disapproved of by corporate policy. Again as others have state - big difference between this stuff being discoverable and it being easily searched, sliced and diced.
What's the big difference other than smaller players having access to this information? Maybe I'm going to far applying computer security concepts to real life but this was possible before, so making it easier to access only really changes how educated the users are about over-sharing. I mean, if you wanted to educate people in a "wow that's creepy" way like firesheep did you would build something like this. If you s…
I think this is a classic example of where there's a meaningful difference between possible and really easy. To use a topical analogy. People in the UK can do a mass-killing, with knives or clubs. People in the US can do it a whole lot easier because they have access to high powered firearms.
Re: The Creepy Details of Facebook's New Graph Search
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
How can you feel about clicking on an Ad that matches one interest of yours if you don't know the additional targeting criteria? The more specific the criteria, the more likely the "advertiser" is a spear fisher. I can think of a couple exploits (Err- links) one might pay to send to "groups" like: All Oracle employees who like sailboats and tennis. All Universal Health Care employees who like Oracle. All apple employ…
They do real time privacy checking. They wrote about it in their engineering blog. So for a query like "All Oracle employees who like sailboats and tennis", they check to see that the person has shared each of these facts with you, and only shows up if everything checks out. It's possible for you to be friends with someone who is an Oracle employee but they have only shared their employer information with a select gr…
I was actually referring to the danger of allowing specific profile criteria in advertising campaigns not in public queries.
The advertiser will presumably never see the actual profiles of the fb users, but they will know too much about the visitor(s) arriving from that Ad.
The post I replied to implied allowing "creepy" levels of targeting for Ads was not such a risk.
Re: The Creepy Details of Facebook's New Graph Search
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's the big difference other than smaller players having access to this information? Maybe I'm going to far applying computer security concepts to real life but this was possible before, so making it easier to access only really changes how educated the users are about over-sharing. I mean, if you wanted to educate people in a "wow that's creepy" way like firesheep did you would build something like this. If you s…
I think this is a classic example of where there's a meaningful difference between possible and really easy. To use a topical analogy. People in the UK can do a mass-killing, with knives or clubs. People in the US can do it a whole lot easier because they have access to high powered firearms.
I see what you mean, but I don't think your analogy fits. People are only vulnerable if they choose to be and it's not the difference between knives and firearms, it's the difference between the powerful with firearms and everyone with firearms.
I think my Firesheep comparison was better. Firesheep made something possible easy and the result was not an outbreak of hijacked email and social media accounts although that certainly happened in cases where it wouldn't have otherwise. The result was education through surprise and an actual improvement in online security practices (defaulting to https).
If someone is going to have this level of information more transparency about what there is and what can be done with it is the lesser of two evils.
Re: The Creepy Details of Facebook's New Graph Search
#38Wasn't it Assange that said fb was the greatest spying machine ever invented? Why the heck people will continuously give away private information with no safeguard that information will ever remain private in the future, I will never understand. Graph Search is just one more example of 'transparency creep' until there is only a microcosm of privacy left, and even that will likely be an illusion.
> Why the heck people will continuously give away private information with no safeguard that information will ever remain private in the future, I will never understand
I do understand. People don't evaluate risk correctly. They are fundamentally irrational in all sorts of strange ways. Humans have a strong optimism bias[1] so even if they know something bad might happen to some people they know that will happen to other people, not to them. The benefit, even when it's tiny in comparison, they get right now.
Thanks to the fascinating new neuroscience around cognitive biases you too can go from thinking you'll never understand to despairing for the future of humanity!
At least now someone will probably do a Firesheep-esque [2] "look how creepy you can be" app that will get some attention. And that kind of attention is exactly the antidote to the optimism bias as well as many of the others at play here, it's actually very effective because it plays into other well known biases [3][4]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimism_bias
[2] http://codebutler.com/firesheep/
Re: The Creepy Details of Facebook's New Graph Search
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
They do real time privacy checking. They wrote about it in their engineering blog. So for a query like "All Oracle employees who like sailboats and tennis", they check to see that the person has shared each of these facts with you, and only shows up if everything checks out. It's possible for you to be friends with someone who is an Oracle employee but they have only shared their employer information with a select gr…
I was actually referring to the danger of allowing specific profile criteria in advertising campaigns not in public queries. The advertiser will presumably never see the actual profiles of the fb users, but they will know too much about the visitor(s) arriving from that Ad. The post I replied to implied allowing "creepy" levels of targeting for Ads was not such a risk.
Right, that's their whole business, as is Google's. They developed a platform that takes their valuable data and allows for targeted advertising, and they sell advertising on that platform. The advertiser never sees the actual profile page or even know that they showed an ad to a particular user. Only the platform and the algorithms know this.
"Creepy" levels of targeting is pretty subjective. I don't think its creepy because the other side is essentially oblivious to who they're advertising to. I'd rather see no ads at all, but if I had to put up with ads, I'd rather see ads that advertise topics that I'm interested in rather than something that's completely irrelevant to me.
Of course, that's just my opinion.