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Actual Facebook Graph Searches

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241–250 of 251 posts

Re: Actual Facebook Graph Searches

#241

Just realized that Graph Search is a great tool to aggregate homosexuals in any area - "Men who live nearby and are interested in men" (or replace "men" with "women"). Great tool for taking homophobia to a whole new level. One can of course argue that liberal groups can use this information for an opposite purpose.

Grindr already exists...

Re: Actual Facebook Graph Searches

#242

Just realized that Graph Search is a great tool to aggregate homosexuals in any area - "Men who live nearby and are interested in men" (or replace "men" with "women"). Great tool for taking homophobia to a whole new level. One can of course argue that liberal groups can use this information for an opposite purpose.

This is sort of a weird assumption to leap too. Would "People who like the page Black People" also be targeted? Would Republicans target people who are marked as "liberal"? Or maybe I'm overly optimistic about homophobic people being either dumb enough or unmotivated enough to do such a thing. Heh, if anything, I'm more worried about it bringing back a resurgence of random messages from people who found me through th…

Finally, a way to find single gay dudes who dig MongoDB... ;-)

Re: Actual Facebook Graph Searches

#243
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might well lose touch with a geographically diverse crowd of people. FB and the like keep people involved in the minutiae of each others lives and very much help keep real friendships alive. Of course FB is trying to destroy this as much as possible by controlling what you see of what people post. Trying to decide what's important to me is another facet of the 'dumb' algorithms the OP complains about.

>Of course FB is trying to destroy this as much as possible by controlling what you see of what people post. Because the alternative brings the wingnuts out. The more Facebook lets people see, the more they get castigated for doing what the entire freaking purpose of a social network site is!

I know there have been a lot of issues about information leaking out because of various security and privacy defaults being bad, but that's not what I meant.

There seems to be some algorithm deciding what gets put into your stream by weighting posts on who you most frequently interact with and how "important" the news is, meaning that your fb experience turns more and more into a echo chamber, and posts by people that don't post often seem to get lost.

Anyway, meh I say, meh!

Re: Actual Facebook Graph Searches

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is obvious that you either didn't read the search queries on the linked page, or you don't understand the impact that some of these queries can have on peoples' lives. People are stupid, so when warned, the will still act stupid. Despite this it is still the responsibility of whoever is able, to protect them, even against themselves. I also agree with the argument of others here that facebook, to some, seems like…

>People are stupid, so when warned, the will still act stupid. Despite this it is still the responsibility of whoever is able, to protect them, even against themselves. Is this really a mainstream political philosophy on HN?

We keep smoking when we know it is unhealthy, we keep drinking and driving, we vote on politicians based on one liners and the amount of media attention they get, we believe that the evolution theory is 'just a theory', we get in huge debt because of loans we cannot pay and we keep posting things on Facebook despite knowing better.

We are stupid in the sense that we do very stupid things even though we, in many cases (should), know better. It is the task of 'us' (people who know about internet privacy) to protect other people around us from being stupid with Facebook just as I would like to be protected by others in the things I am stupid at.

Re: Actual Facebook Graph Searches

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is basically saying you're ok with "security through obscurity". You already said you were ok with "security through obscurity" when you logged in with a password .

Huh? Passwords aren't considered "security through obscurity". http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4486171/isnt-a-password-a...

The very first answer to the question you posted seems to disagree. They poster basically points out that when people say "security through obscurity" they don't mean passwords. Well, of course they don't or they'd realize that security by obscurity is valid and used successfully every day. You just need more than one layer of protection. Passwords alone aren't enough, trying to obscure the port number of your service isn't enough, etc.

Re: Actual Facebook Graph Searches

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it that Facebook is endangering individuals? Not really. They most certainly are! Facebook keeps changing the rules of the game. There is a reason why so many countries have Ex post facto law. Facebook, by contract, ends up focusing on Ex post facto exploitation. Would people have put in these likes on the same account had they known that FB would create a search that would let anyone, anywhere do a simple query…

>Would people have put in these likes on the same account had they known that FB would create a search that would let anyone, anywhere do a simple query that exposes them in some way? I doubt they'd have given a shit, let's be honest.

The majority, sure. But every time FB makes on of these changes some small percentage of people decide they've had enough.

Re: Actual Facebook Graph Searches

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? Passwords aren't considered "security through obscurity". http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4486171/isnt-a-password-a...

The very first answer to the question you posted seems to disagree. They poster basically points out that when people say "security through obscurity" they don't mean passwords. Well, of course they don't or they'd realize that security by obscurity is valid and used successfully every day. You just need more than one layer of protection. Passwords alone aren't enough, trying to obscure the port number of your servic…

By your definition basically all computer security is security through obscurity. After all, crypto keys are really just obscure numbers that could be guessed.

The only exception would be an air gapped network. But wait, what if someone figured out the passcodes and physical keys to enter the building?!

Re: Actual Facebook Graph Searches

#248
post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I don't think so either. But I do prefer people use their real name online if possible. I know it is not always possible right now, but do want these problems to be fixed.

Re: Actual Facebook Graph Searches

#249
post #159
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it's (probably) true that the information is already available, it's not easily available. If it's going to take me 25 days of tedious profile reading to find people who I seek (e.g. "Lesbian women from Greece who like Doritos"), I'm not going to do it. It's not practically available. Graph Search changes that. Obscurity vanishes, along with any security it provided.

By 25 days of profile reading, I think you mean 2 days of writing a scraper and 10 days of tuning it? The rest being spent letting it run, reading hacker news, reddit, and your friends' facebook updates.

[deleted]

Re: Actual Facebook Graph Searches

#250
post #159
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it's (probably) true that the information is already available, it's not easily available. If it's going to take me 25 days of tedious profile reading to find people who I seek (e.g. "Lesbian women from Greece who like Doritos"), I'm not going to do it. It's not practically available. Graph Search changes that. Obscurity vanishes, along with any security it provided.

By 25 days of profile reading, I think you mean 2 days of writing a scraper and 10 days of tuning it? The rest being spent letting it run, reading hacker news, reddit, and your friends' facebook updates.

Facebook doesn't let any random bot crawl Facebook with scrapers. If you go to:

https://www.facebook.com/robots.txt

it says:

# Notice: if you would like to crawl Facebook you can

# contact us here: http://www.facebook.com/apps/site_scraping_tos.php

# to apply for white listing. Our general terms are available

# at http://www.facebook.com/apps/site_scraping_tos_terms.php

(Then there's a bunch of "Disallow:" statements for Baidu, Google, etc.)

If you follow the link, you can apply to Facebook for permission to do "automated data collection." Even if you do get permission, Facebook is very restrictive with what you're allowed to do with the scraped data.

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