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Actual Facebook Graph Searches

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221–230 of 251 posts

Re: Actual Facebook Graph Searches

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 like d on FB.

Best to just set it up so "Only you" can see your own likes. http://abrax.us/Facebook/EditLikes.php

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?

Re: Actual Facebook Graph Searches

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you scroll down the link, it's right there. http://actualfacebookgraphsearches.tumblr.com/post/412333061...

Sorry, I should have added a final point that I made in another post: "Interested in" is not interpreted by everybody as "sexual attracted in". I'd be willing to bet that in Iranian culture, it's quite common to say you are interested in being friends with men, and it is not viewed as homosexual.

Bullies, zealots, and police are prone to misinterpreting words in the way which is most beneficial to THEIR ends, not yours. The kids denied entry into the US because they said they were going to "destroy" $CITY were a prime example of this, where "destroy" was local slang for "get drunk and party in $town".

Similarly, anyone looking to oppress gays will say, "He likes men. Why didn't he say he likes women? He must be gay." You can't argue what you really meant in a kangaroo court, or when a mob of angry villagers are throwing stones: it's too late by then.

Re: Actual Facebook Graph Searches

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. When Graph Searches were announced, I thought "meh, I'm tired of FB...". I never thought to explore what Graph Searches actually meant . And I would never have done so or will do so, but I'm very glad that someone has investigated the system. >it will always lead to situations like that which are [bad] I wonder if there isn't some definition analogous to "Turing complete" for social graphs? i.e. with a sufficien…

Zuckerberg thinks people complain about privacy because they're old-fashioned and scared of the future. He thinks in the future we're all going to be extremely open, share shit all the time, aaaand basically the whole world is going to be one big chat room where people don't really hide things any more. Personally I think he's probably right. It has shades of that old totalitarian argument, 'why should you be worried…

It's worth noting that it's in Zuckerberg's financial interest should such a No Secrets reality come to pass.

Which should give one pause about whether he's giving an honest, objective assessment of the available information. One would expect quite a bit of confirmation bias when billions are on the line.

As to whether there will be a time without secrets: I don't see how that's even possible. Humans are social and tribal but they're also political. Politics is all about the tactful (mis)application of lies to swing tribal balance.

There will always be something people want to keep 'private'. Always something that the tribes disagree on and judge one another over. Regardless of whether those feelings and beliefs are substantiated in objective reality.

Re: Actual Facebook Graph Searches

#224
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

| 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 |…

Maybe because I am also a "20-something", but I do not see how Zuckerburg/facebook employees being "sheltered" (I don't know why you asserted that, unless you went to high school with him) has anything to do with Social Graph. 1.) The fact that they had this information is not surprising at all. Again maybe because I am a 20-something, I think its pretty obvious that if you had terabytes of data you would want to sea…

GuiA answered your question above: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5101237

Re: Actual Facebook Graph Searches

#225
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your opinion on the following scenario: An "Islamic gay man living in Tehran" in 1997 creates a web page and populates it with exactly the same personal information you are describing. Sometime later Google comes of age and indexes his site for the world to easily discover. Do you feel that Google and Facebook are acting differently in this scenario, and if so, why?

I do. Primarily because Facebook caters to users with low technical ability and includes baked in privacy settings that are notoriously ambiguous and difficult to understand. Facebook actively promotes an anti-privacy styled online presence. Those with the skills to build a website in '97, along with the requisite metatags to allow for the type of indexing you describe can reasonably be expected to understand what th…

I built a website in or around '97 on geocities. You talk about metatags being required for indexing but I think you forget that the web was young once. Google had a voracious appetite to index and they still do.

The barrier to entry for someone to build a website in '97 wasn't much higher than it is now. Things just look prettier these days.

Re: Actual Facebook Graph Searches

#226
post #217

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?

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.

Re: Actual Facebook Graph Searches

#227
post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I should have added a final point that I made in another post: "Interested in" is not interpreted by everybody as "sexual attracted in". I'd be willing to bet that in Iranian culture, it's quite common to say you are interested in being friends with men, and it is not viewed as homosexual.

Bullies, zealots, and police are prone to misinterpreting words in the way which is most beneficial to THEIR ends, not yours. The kids denied entry into the US because they said they were going to "destroy" $CITY were a prime example of this, where "destroy" was local slang for "get drunk and party in $town". Similarly, anyone looking to oppress gays will say, "He likes men. Why didn't he say he likes women? He must…

I completely agree. Let's stop using words altogether because they can be misunderstood. You first please.

Re: Actual Facebook Graph Searches

#228

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

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.

Re: Actual Facebook Graph Searches

#229
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"; it will always lead to situations like that which are, at best, embarrassing, and at worst, dangerous, for whoever is in the system. What does this even mean? The "dumb algorithm" here will (a) take a user's query and (b) search that user's friends and public profiles for hits on that query. What's ne…

"If you don't like it, then quit"

My former boss said this in a morale speech. At the time I thought was being an a-hole. There had been some complaints on safety and usefulness of an exercise and that was his response to it.

Then I realized he was right, and that's why he's a former boss of mine.

Also, bjust silently quitting facebook and sinking back to real life

Re: Actual Facebook Graph Searches

#230
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"; it will always lead to situations like that which are, at best, embarrassing, and at worst, dangerous, for whoever is in the system. What does this even mean? The "dumb algorithm" here will (a) take a user's query and (b) search that user's friends and public profiles for hits on that query. What's ne…

"If you don't like it, then quit"

My former boss said this in a morale speech. At the time I thought was being an a-hole. There had been some complaints on safety and usefulness of an exercise and that was his response to it.

Then I realized he was right, and that's why he's a former boss of mine.

Just silently quitting facebook was something I did recently. It's not the end of the world. Quite the opposite really.

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