Facebook's Graph Search Is a Privacy Test For Internet Users 104
An anonymous reader writes "An article in the NY Times makes the case that Graph Search, Facebook's recently unveiled social search utility, will be a test for users of the social networking site which will have consequences for the internet at large. The test will show whether people are willing to take the next step in sharing parts of their lives, and whether social search is the future for online interaction. '...the company engineers who created the tool — former Google employees — say that the project will not reach its full potential if Facebook data is "sparse," as they call it. But the company is confident people will share more data, be it the movies they watch, the dentists they trust or the meals that make their mouths water.' CompSci professor Oren Etzioni says it's a watershed moment for the social internet because of the scale at which Facebook operates. A decade ago, people began making the choice to share their lives online; buying into social search would be the biggest step since then. A related post by the Electronic Frontier Foundation can be summed up with this single line: 'If you walk down a crowded public street, you are probably seen by dozens of people—but it would still feel creepy for anyone to be able to look up a list of every road you've walked down.'"
Re:Easier for hate groups to find local victims, n (Score:1, Informative)
Lies.
Hometown ,work, education history - all have a little widget next to them that you can use to select what audience can see them. Pages you like can only be controlled on a per-category basis (of which "interests" is one), but you can still choose whether to make them public or not. And it's only searchable if it's public.
Re:Hmm (Score:4, Informative)
"In order to make graph search more valuable, we helpfully disabled all your privacy settings."
Not so far from the truth. In the last "update", they set everybody's "allow search" setting to True.
Coincidence? I think not.