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Actual Facebook Graph Searches

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Re: Actual Facebook Graph Searches

#41

Post by veemjeem »

GuiA wrote: post #5

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, embarrassi…

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

Re: Actual Facebook Graph Searches

#42

Post by zaidf »

potatolicious wrote: post #25
GuiA wrote: post #5

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, embarrassi…

> "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 us…

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.

Re: Actual Facebook Graph Searches

#43

Post by notatoad »

______ wrote: post #8

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.

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.

Re: Actual Facebook Graph Searches

#44

Post by bane »

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.

Re: Actual Facebook Graph Searches

#45

Post by corporalagumbo »

psbp wrote: post #31
corporalagumbo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

I'm not sure I follow you. Right now, Facebook knows roughly this much about me:

1) All of the people I have legitimated as Friends. 2) Screeds and screeds of data about the quality of all my connections with those friends (have I hid them from my news-feed? how much do I interact with their posts? how much do I interact with them? talk to them? share with them? stalk them? how much time do I spend in interactions with them? how do the patterns of my interactions change with them (mouse-click patterns, scroll patterns, typing patterns)? do I use different words (different emotions/more formal/informal language/different function word patterns?) 3) People I've stalked but haven't friended 4) Brands, companies, causes, ideas, things from history, all sorts of random shit I've liked (along with similar data to 2)) 5) What sorts of things I click on, how I leave the site and where I go. And certainly more.

Etc., etc., etc. Facebook didn't manifest my entire social life. They just built a platform which allowed me to socialise orders of magnitude more efficiently than before, a platform of great benefit to me, and one into which I've poured vast quantities of data (and the amount, quality and variety of the data is only set to increase as we open up more input modalities - eg eye-tracking, gesture-tracking, and biometrics). the data is all there. All facebook is doing is cobbling together some of the most very basic tools one might use to make sense of a subset of that data.

Re: Actual Facebook Graph Searches

#46

Post by pyre »

potatolicious wrote: post #25
GuiA wrote: post #5

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, embarrassi…

> "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 us…

  | 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).

Re: Actual Facebook Graph Searches

#48

Post by misiti3780 »

tlrobinson wrote: post #18

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.

spot on!

Re: Actual Facebook Graph Searches

#49

Post by achompas »

zaidf wrote: post #42
potatolicious wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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 us…

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…

The Facebook Graph Search article making the rounds mentions that (a) posts are not searchable at this time, and (b) FB is launching a suite of new privacy settings for Graph Search.

Here's a link:

http://www.wired.com/business/2013/01/the-inside-story-of-gr...

Re: Actual Facebook Graph Searches

#50

Post by GuiA »

potatolicious wrote: post #25
GuiA wrote: post #5

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, embarrassi…

> "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 us…

>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.

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