Actual Facebook Graph Searches

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.

Re: Actual Facebook Graph Searches

#5

Post by GuiA » Wed, Jan 23, 2013, 2:12 AM UTC

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.

Re: Actual Facebook Graph Searches

#6

Post by electic » Wed, Jan 23, 2013, 2:23 AM UTC

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".

Re: Actual Facebook Graph Searches

#7

Post by stephengillie » Wed, Jan 23, 2013, 2:24 AM UTC

harlanlewis wrote: post #3

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&...

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.

Re: Actual Facebook Graph Searches

#8

Post by ______ » Wed, Jan 23, 2013, 2:24 AM UTC

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.

Re: Actual Facebook Graph Searches

#9

Post by dmcy22 » Wed, Jan 23, 2013, 2:32 AM UTC

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.

Re: Actual Facebook Graph Searches

#10

Post by JimWillTri » Wed, Jan 23, 2013, 2:39 AM UTC

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