Slashdot Mirror
Facebook's Graph Search Is a Privacy Test For Internet Users
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.'"
There will be a backlash. Facebook will roll back the feature. Then in a few months, once the backlash has faded, they'll bring it back silently.
What about those of us that do not want to participate in these things? At what point will it become awkward to say state I don't use Facebook, or will it just become some terrible social stigma ::whisper::"He doesn't have a social account.."::/whisper::
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
How often do you listen to your friends recommendations right now? How often are they right for you?
You can be friends with a lot of people, and have different tastes in all kinds of things: music, food, movies, doctors, cars, clothing, ... etc.
Take the road less traveled.
Would were! Should is! Could be! And live a hundred times three.
It's the kind of test that is used to separate dumb people from smart people and then to separate private information from the dumb people.
There's no social stigma to not using Facebook, but there is incredulity. People can't believe you don't use it, but I have lots of friends who have opted out of the social network. When people express shock at your lack of an account, just shrug nonchalantly and say you simply don't have time for it. A large number of people who are FB addicts are so because they have no higher purpose in life. If you're engaged with life, you aren't posting perpetually to your newsfeed.
I confess I get a guilty pleasure out of the semi-regular meltdowns and drama people post on the site that they really shouldn't be sharing. People will post things to facebook or associate themselves with causes that they would never reveal to me were we in person, and people really need to think of Facebook as interacting with 100s of people in person and whether you're okay with every single one of those people knowing these things about you (this includes clicking "Like" or commenting on anything controversial, it's amazing the things I've learned about my friends watching the "Ticker" of activity--it's much worse than the public newsfeed). I have one friend who runs two accounts, a fake one with his real name where he maintains a professional facade, and a real one with a fake name where he feels free to talk about politics and make outrageous controversial statements.
My strategy is that I use my real name on Facebook, but I remain highly cognizant of the fact that I am presenting a public persona. I've posted controversial subjects only a few times, and ended up pulling those things down. Instead, I try to post things that I feel present me in the best possible light. I word everything like a politician, keep my content engaging but noncontroversial, and block/hide anyone who posts controversial comments in response to my posts. There are one or two photos of me passed out at a party from 10 years ago online, but you can't find them anymore because I've flooded the internet with subjectmatter that I'm proud of and want associated with me. It's all in how you use it, and every single teenager should be put into a mandatory public school class to teach them how to manage their online reputations and the real life consequences of their online actions.
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
Try a search for "gay people in Kenya," for example.
I don't know if these people all made the mistake of thinking the "interested in" sections of their profiles would not be publicly visible by default, or whether they set them public but were relying on the obscurity of only friends looking them up. Perhaps some made their accounts years ago, and haven't kept up with the ever-eroding privacy on this site that requires you to go back and re-specify as private some things that used to be private by default. The point is, it hasn't been this easy before to just search for masses of people based on one common trait.
Whether it's being gay [an orientation (not just a set of activities) still actively punishable by death or jail time in many countries], atheist or minority religion in a fundamentalist country, or some other minority that can be profiled ("people who like red hair in London" -- only partly joking, "gingers" do get bullied), a lot of people are about to find out what Facebook Feature Creep really means.
Get off my launchpad!
that I'll share my virtual girlfriend. she's mine, all mine!!!
I got to the chocolate box before you, that's why the hard ones have teeth marks.
So, FB are finally getting around to putting the creepy in feature creep?
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Remember when we naively thought computers would allow us to live the leisure society as all the menial tasks would be done by computers, just like shoveling is done by machine these days? Instead we have the workweek from before the Industrial Revolution with computerized trivialities replacing real, actual worth.
How do I get off this planet?
So if I want to get someone's login for a site, I can just search FB for the answers to personal questions...favorite movie, first car, birthplace, etc.
A couple of years ago, Facebook decided to make everyone's interests public. Not just public by default either - there's no longer any way of restricting who can view your interests, or your hometown, or your work and education history, or which pages you've liked. All of that is now unconditionally public, and all of it is now searchable too.
Well, perhaps not.
Arguably "privacy" does not mean what it might have forty years ago. Some of that is related directly to the way that Internet technology can retain data, and the ways that that data can be searched and manipulated.
That is something to be watched, and I've found myself more and more cautious about what I post on-line, but it's also a lot of what makes the modern Internet so damned useful.
I like it that Google usually can guess what I need. I like it that Amazon can suggest books or music that I actually would like to buy. I like that my smartphone is such a phenomenally handy tool, one that I use many times each day, and that would be nowhere near as useful without the might of Google behind it.
Hell, I like that I'm automagically logged into Slashdot every time I open up the site in my browser. It's handy.
Still, despite all of this, I do find Facebook's latest "creep" to be a bit uncomfortable. And yes, I'm one of those people who trusts Google, but who somehow don't trust Facebook. Hence the vast difference between what I'll trust to my Gmail account, and what I'll post to Facebook.
Still, despite the above, you have to accept that people's definition of "privacy" has changed. When I was growing up every house had an album full of photographs. If you came to visit our house we might show it to you, or we might not.
Now I have relatives who have literally thousands upon thousands of baby pictures, kid pictures, family pictures, videos, and God knows what else all posted to Facebook and accessible to hundreds of people. By their standards this is normal, and OK.
Instead of foaming at the mouth, or shrieking that no-one should ever be part of Facebook!!!, we should be figuring out how to manage a reasonable level of privacy in an age that will include Google, and Facebook, and all of those other fun and useful sites that we love.
ps - I can recall, back in the seventies and eighties, knowing people who refused to own a telephone - their arguments sounded pretty much the same.
Three Squirrels
Okay, I'm a hypocrite. I don't have a FB account. But I think it makes far more sense to have a FB account that you fill with partly real, mostly bogus information than not having one and getting marked out as a oddball, paranoid, delusional type. The thing is, use FB the way savvy celebrities use the media. Generate just enough buzz to throw off the scent and make people believe you're a normal person, whatever that means. "Hold" fake opinions on non-controversial topics. Don't hold controvesial views on controversial topics, or pick a few pet controversies like nuclear power, gun or animal rights. And decline invites from people you don't know or haven't re-searched well. Accept invites from the operators of both political parties. This will make you less like to attract the attention of the Feds, than being RMS.
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.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
They're more than welcome to check out my hometown (arkham, massachusets) or see where I went to school (Miskatonic U), or where I went to high school (sunnydale high).
FIX THE PROBLEMS AT HOME
I'll "fix the problems at home" by NOT using stupid privacy-invading bullshit like Failbook.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Falsehood modded insightful, verifiable truth modded down. Gotta love this place.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
I fail to see how this feature will be accurate enough because FaceBook users are not all that consistent. I don't wish to be brash but the general population are the single most worst data entry officers / records keepers.
FB is not set up or used to be used as a professional tool. E.G Going to a Dentist based on your friends "likes" **. Since "liking" a place, doesn't equate to the place being right next to you and your family members / friends could live on the other side of the country, therefore rendering a useless search. It requires a tremendous amount of GPS overhead on the places to get the results right. I.E the place in question, your friends and yourself needs to be accurate (up-to-date) which means "taken" and then used to compile search relevancy.
Another example, Going to a place for dinner means you've uploaded a photo of you being with a pile of people at a particular place and nine times out of ten nobody really goes to the place and tags the "place" in the photo. Besides, if your friends went their and YOU didn't, maybe it's time to take a good long hard look at yourself and think "it's time to reduce my Facebook hours because I'm not getting invited out any more."
I see the long term potential of something like this eventually combating Google Places (at best) but the issues are to that is Google Places already does this better, it's a part of real technology like, I dunno, Android (a working popular mobile platform).
Many Google Places house reviews by strangers about particular locations which I think is good enough besides the last thing companies want is to do is lose the power of their own reviews and they will if they ask FB to base their company's importance against competitors via social interaction. In essence using this services means Businesses are going to have to give up the control on their own product popularity and leave it in the hands of the general population to decide.
Lastly, I fail to see it's overall relevancy. Dentist? are people that much of losers to post which dentist they go to? really? People who complain about privacy yet post this kind of data only has themselves to blame if they post who their freaking doctors are on FB.
** Yes it's one of the key examples used in Zukkers presentation video, look it up, its worth a laugh just how 1 min in the whole thing it loses all substance.
Argues: No. Privacy means exactly what it used to mean. What's confusing you is that you have a lot less of it now, and that a lot of people -- perhaps including you -- are unaware of what they've lost.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Nobody cares about gays. If you're looking to point out the evils of facebook stalking technology, don't point out minority groups in a country most people couldn't place on a map. Point out instead that kids are now fair game for stalking. *That* is an argument against Facebook that the soccer moms and politicians will get behind 100%.
Are you knowingly posting lies or are you not aware that what you say is false because you don't use facebook?
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
A few years ago, kids assumed that "what happens on Facebook stays on Facebook". This emboldened kids to post stuff they wouldn't normally say in public. That's no longer true. Moms and dads and grandparents and employers are on FB and demanding to be friended. Hiring managers not only scan public profiles, they demand paswords to see the private stuff. The response is to fake up public profiles http://yro.slashdot.org/story/08/02/01/1618215/online-reputation-management-to-keep-your-nose-clean
Facebook stupidity will filter out the bottom of the barrel out of the job market. But expect to see more and more bland conformist "employment-friendly" profiles that don't really reflect the person. Smart kids will go back to texting/phoning/email for real communications.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
.
My best guess as to what Facebook Feature Creep will mean about one month from now, when the next Facebook update occurs is:
. Facebook Featured Creep: This week, we highlight and feature Facebook's Creep of the Week -- the person or corporate person who has done the most stalking or creeping or creeping out of others. Please note that Facebook itself, having already become Creep of the Century and Creep of the Millennium, is NOT in contention for the Facebook Featured Creep of the Week award.
#
127.0.0.1 facebook.com www.facebook.com
Mark Zuckerberg, is that you?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
If someone had the desire and the resources, at least as to roads I've walked since they had both of those, sure they could make a list. So it's already possible. Or if I generally have them beside me when I walk, they'd either know or be able to mostly guess correctly, so I'm used to at least someone being able to do that. What does it matter if you all can? I chose what affects me, what happens in the universe or is done by others matters not very much at all...
This will only speed up the development of that highly anticipated private encrypted decentralized social thing site concept idea
If it still exists.
Privacy is terrorism.
Don't care, don't have Facebook account for just because of this kind of crap. Did I mention lately that I hate Apple, too? Ya, I guess I did in an earlier post.
I originally listed myself in Facebook some years back because those around me said it was interesting, however, I find it to be more annoying than interesting. But..my kids, my grankids, my adopted family and kids all seem to spend time constantly with it. I'm busy using the net for other things so I don't spend enough time with it to really understand it and those hundreds & hundreds of folks who all seem to want to be friends....well I wish I could easily dump them with one click. I use it only to check who from my family, relatives and friends that are showing up in my email for various reasons. I thought of dumping out of it, but because they're in it I haven't and I guess I'm apologizing for not going to it frequently enough, but time is a major factor for me and I'm not really sure nowadays what I'm doing with it!
so... you think Zuckerberg's personal machine runs Facebook?
Or is it that you just don't understand host files?
I think that you just don't understand humour
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.