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Facebook's Graph Search: Kiss Your Privacy Goodbye
Nerval's Lobster writes "Software developer Jeff Cogswell is back with an extensive under-the-hood breakdown of Facebook's Graph Search, trying to see if peoples' privacy concerns about the social network's search engine are entirely justified. His conclusion? 'Some of the news articles I've read talk about how Graph Search will start small and slowly grow as it accumulates more information. This is wrong—Graph Search has been accumulating information since the day Facebook opened and the first connections were made in the internal graph structure,' he writes. 'People were nervous about Google storing their history, but it pales in comparison to the information Facebook already has on you, me, and roughly a billion other people.' There's much more at the link, including a handy breakdown of graph theory."
You kissed your privacy goodbye when you signed up for a social network.
the minute you logged into FB you had to kiss your privacy goodbye?
What does FaceBook have on me? It has my email address. It has my cell number. Other than that it contains a lot of innocuous posts that I couldn't care less who read.
I have been peppering my FB check-ins with places that I have been to, noting events that never took place, mixed in with real check-ins. I have set my "Lives in" city to somewhere different every day this year. Unless you know me, good luck figuring out what on my FB page is real and what isn't.
I don't use my real name.
No one I work with is a "friend".
No one from my hometown is a "friend".
All of my info like birthdates, schools, etc, is bogus.
I have hundreds of friends from underground subcultures, none with any official, family, or business connections.
The majority of my hundreds of friends have bogus info, like me.
My spouse and family are not marked as such on FB.
There are no pictures of me that are not heavily obscured.
So... FB may have info on Me, as "somebody", some entity, but if there really is almost no connection to a real person, I'm not very concerned.
If you want your info private, don't put it on the Internet. It's as simple as that.
this may be a solution while walking in public, let's say in a shopping mall and having your image on fazebook - 11 LED's.
How it holds up in bright daylight will need to be seen.
Privacy Protection Techniques Using Differences in Human and Device Sensitivity
Be sure and spend lots of time posting something insightful since all this whole submission is meant to do is generate hits from search engines!
Why on Earth would anyone post anything of value on Facebook? A few years ago whent the stories of Facebook's security and privacy concerns began to surface - THIS wasn't a clue? I honestly don't understand how this is news. People who didn't care about it years ago aren't going to care about their privacy now, and those who DO care fall into two categories; 1) They don't use Facebook at all 2) When they do, they post bogus information or omit information entirely because they don't trust the network. Soooooo, how is any of this news again?!
Do not enter your real name on a social network, use a Psuedonym, call yourself something else like you would on IRC, AIM, YIM, etc. Only friend people who you know on their Psuedonym. People. Quit. Putting. Your. Real. Name. On. Accounts.
Be sure and spend lots of time posting something insightful since all this whole submission is meant to do is generate hits from search engines!
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
And make sure your pseudonym is used by other people too. Otherwise its an even more unique identifier.
Yes people let us live in fear. Fear the bogeyman. Hide your truth. Isn't it obvious this is the path to a brighter future.
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
If a foreign government agency had spent years gathering data, and was mining it for undisclosed (possibly nefarious) purposes, It would be known as a dangerous spy network, would be subjected to infiltration/corruption and possible attack. I completely fail to understand why people tell FB anything about themselves ever, and don't request immediate deletion of all the data held about them. When governments try and spy on someone, they get all upset about it, when FB does it, and freely allows the data to be sold to the highest bidder/anyone who cares to look, people think its really cool and useful. what does it take for people to say enough is enough? Is it too late now, since the data is already gathered? why do I fail to see the upside of FB and its data gathering ilk?
People who post pictures of themself drunk, passed out pants round their ankles in the street are concerned with privacy.
As long as Facebook doesn't publish which Friends-of-Friends' pictures I browsed for 20 minutes, I'll be fine...
God, I can be such a creep.
graph is a FUCKING NIGHTMARE for privacy.
Background: I've signed up for this dating site..
I see a profile of someone who interests me, and being a nerd, I can figure out their last name, and find their facebook page..
The really scary part? I plug into facebook graph
Friends of "Interesting girl name" who are friends of my friends
I got hits.. Two results
J, D, S and R - friends of mine, and known to me, have a facebook friend who happen to be down as a friend of this person....
One of the four is friends with both search results.
I have never had a FB account, real or fake. Although I have several friends that do, and they sometimes discuss things about me. I wonder how much FB know about me?
The anonymous ship sailed a long time ago for pretty much anybody who has ever done anything public under their own name. I could be easily googled well before FB came along. That doesn't particularly bother me; I don't have any mortal enemies that I'm hiding from, and I'd like any old friends to be able to find me if they want to do so. The rules haven't changed: if you really want to be private for some reason, don't do anything public (and anything on the internet is public) under your real name--for that matter, you might want to consider changing your name to something generic with 100,000 Google hits that aren't you.
I wrote this a while ago but I will continue to post it as long as stupid people exist: You Do Not Have A Facebook Page!. Facebook has a page on you.
I signed up to Facebook and occasionally update Facebook's page on me, I find the service quite useful for keeping in touch with people, but I am under no illusions as to why Facebook provides this service. Anyone who uses Facebook with anything they expect to keep private has seriously misunderstood their relationship with the company.
sheep.horse - does not contain information on sheep or horses.
privacy = dishonesty That isn't to say that all dishonesty is necessarily negative, but I challenge anyone to think of a single instance of "privacy" that isn't also "dishonest" if you assume that withholding the truth is also being dishonest. Sure, there are plenty of things that are none of anybody's business, but the indisputable fact is that we can't know what isn't anybody else's business, unless we know what it is first. I for one welcome our future computerized overlord that will decide what is and what isn't anybody's business without humans having to get involved. After all, those automatic toilet flushing devices have been watching you go for years now! What was this about? Privacy on Facebook? Who the hell publishes something on a public site design for sharing information and expects that information not to be shared. It's like people eat like pigs, never exercise and cry about being fat and out of shape. STFU.
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
Yes people let us live in fear. Fear the bogeyman. Hide your truth. Isn't it obvious this is the path to a brighter future.
Interestingly enough, I just did a global birth certificate search, and besides not finding one for a "Barrack Obama" in the US or any protectorate or territory thereof (which we all knew anyway), I did find one listing an official name of "Jmc23". Just "Jmc23". Parents listed as "Run Dmc" and "J-Lo".
There is only one time when you use real information: when you're paying for a service and it has a vested interest in keeping your information off the open internet.
Otherwise, it's time to fill in the B.S. Think of your best friend as a child, and a common object around the house. Those terms are your first name and last respectively.
- Dave Paperweight
0.0.0.0 connect.facebook.com
0.0.0.0 graph.facebook.com
Or, just run Ghostery, which scrubs the whole lot of 'em. Anyone browsing the modern internet without at least an adblocker and a tracker/analytics blocker pretty much deserve what they get.
Are you saying that fear is the path to a brighter future?
OR
living in a dystopian FB/"We know what you think before you think it" future?
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
From my understanding, this new feature still pays attention to your privacy settings. If you don't have your privacy settings set right, that is your fault. If you don't think Facebook gives you enough control in its privacy settings, don't use Facebook. If you have a public Facebook profile with sensitive private information on it, you are an idiot and big companies have been aggravating your data for a while now.
At first, I thought FaceBook users were a bunch of popularity whores looking for scores of friends and their own reality TV fix. Now, I simply think users just don't make the connection to a bunch of online connections and how quickly and easily their activity propagates to each other.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
The real problem, As I see it, is that in the not too distant future:
everyone in the US will essentially be forced to have a Social Network account to be able to function in modern society.
More and more I see all manner of business and government entities handing responsibility over to FB for all sorts of things. It's actually quite disgusting, but not surprising given the (d)evolution of our database driven society. A centralized system of user accounts that almost everything done digitally can use?
When I first saw the subtle changes taking place with FB, things like not being able to contact my local PBS television station unless I used FB , or not being able to enter a contest to see one of my favorite bands unless I used FB I knew it would be only a matter of time until everyone will be forced to have an account.
Currently I don't have one, and never have. However I am part of a group that has an account, and my name and image are located there, so I'm "in the system" as it were.
Once everyone is forced to have an account, then the next step will be for society in general to force those with accounts to update those accounts. There will come a time when via our smartphones those accounts will be updated automatically.
It's almost at that point now:
Who you've talked to.
What you said.
Where you went.
What you bought.
What you listened to.
What you read.
What you think.
Disgusting, reprehensible, wrong
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Or they don't really care?
Is everyone really 6 degrees from Kevin Bacon?
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
... on Facebook. HeHeHe .... HeHe .... He .. He .. hmmm???
Think about how many times some moron has shared information about a crime they committed on Facebook. I think they care, but they don't understand how quickly information spreads.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Yet Another Reason Not To Do FaceBook.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
That defeats one of the most attractive features/purposes of Facebook ... the ability to locate (or be located) by old friends and connections you knew from school, previous jobs, etc.
Don't forget, Facebook basically sprung up from the ashes of the old pay sites like Classmates.com. People were eager enough to locate each other using a site like this, they used to pay good money for memberships. Then Facebook came along and said they'd do the same thing at no cost.
If you really don't want people to know anything about you, why would you ever use a site like Facebook in the first place? (The online games are really second-rate fare, so that's not even a very good reason, IMO.)
I'm not denying there are very real, serious privacy implications to using social networking sites... and I'm just as certain there are govt. agencies heavily backing sites like Facebook as info-gathering tools for their own purposes. But I don't have a big problem with using it in a responsible manner. I understand I'm giving up some privacy by posting info on the site, but I'm selectively about what I offer there. Most of it, I don't consider a big deal for others to have. In fact, most content I put there is along the lines of sharing URLs to other pages of information -- so I'm just redirecting some traffic in those cases. Can they analyze that and learn some of my interests? Yup. Do I care? Nope.
Unfortunately I might add. There are OG tags all over the place and even see a FB icon next to a username sometimes. What's up with that?
KERNEL PANIC -SIGFAULT AT ADDRESS #51A54D07
Great now everybody knows the reason for my big mouth and ass!
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
You mean "Zombie Ryushu" is not your real name??
May Peace Prevail On Earth
There are people, and friends of mine who use Facebook as their only means of Contact.
He is sayin we have nothing to fear from the ignorant, prejudiced masses and the omniscient and omnipotent powers that be.
Basically he is stating his commitment to remain an obedient and undisrupting conformist forever.
Website that your enter every minute detail of your life along with trackers on millions of websites to tie your browsing habits directly to your account has more personal information than one that passively collects your information through ads and search results.
I did that a few years ago, but got kicked off after three weeks because of it. Hence, why I refuse to it, Google+, etc.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I suspect that Facebook is being funded, if not operated, and at the least has certainly been heavily infiltrated by a US three-letter agency. NSA, CIA, NRO, one of those guys. The amount of information freely offered and the graph connections that have been growing since Day 1 are a staggering resource for spies. As would be a list of people who don't appear in the graphs.
sPh
What part of "don't do written/verbal diarrhea on the internet" and "if you do so anyways, don't use your real name" is all about fear? I mean, part of me is happy about Facebook because it sort of proves the idea that if enough people engage in that sort of written diarrhea dumping every little bit of their life that it becomes such an annoying and boring waste that only a small handful of people (or maybe no one) will bother to follow, hence proving the idea that "the truth will set your free" and "information wants to be free" can be fulfilled.
And then I look at how much (a) Facebook and others are profiting off of this using data mining and such and how nefariously it could all be used and (b) just how much it really isn't being ignored. Facebook started off as a sort of college social club with almost high school-like mentality. Its net result has been to include a lot more people back into that high school-like mentality--where probably through nothing else but isolation that sort of thing ended in high school and so social circles ended up being a lot smaller and of much more limited scope. Of course, perhaps I'd feel a whole lot better if "high school-like mentality" was a positive thing.
Eurohacker European paranoia, gun rights, and h
I can back this statement as an AC.
It's true. Too many people I know use Facebook as their primary means of communication.
We have no more privacy. It doesn't exist anymore. You can find anything out about anyone with some effort. The only thing stopping that from happening is a restraining order on everyone you know.
But that would leave your life very... dull, wouldn't it?
Maybe we should embrace the fact that we can know everyone around us... and they know everything about you.
It's hard for many out there that want to control every single bit of information about themselves. But as time passes, it will become even more impossible to hide.
Yes, hosts files are a valid and good way to block sites. It might not use wildcards, but it is only a single layer (Ghostery, Adblock Plus, NoScript, RequestPolicy, etc) that absolutely is effective.
MVPS.org updates it's hosts file every month or so and is quite reliable. I would know since my job deals with network, database, and computer security very deeply on many different levels.
Should it be the only way to stop tracking? Of course not. But to just out right dismiss it as being effective at all is laughable. There are tens of thousands of known domains that, once removed, add another effective layer of security.
That's like saying you shouldn't use any anti-virus at all since it is a known fact that anti-virus can't catch 80% of the new malware out there. http://www.zdnet.com/eighty-percent-of-new-malware-defeats-antivirus-1139263949/
Are you sure you don't work for an ad company?
And use the filters you mention.
Adblock Plus really IS an awesome method, and dirt simple to use.
Remember to uncheck "Show unobtrusive ads" in the settings.
If anything gets through, you can open up the Adblock Plus dialog and then choose that to be discarded.
While you're at it, filter out the g+ icons too...
People thought I was crazy to abstain from FB. Then after FB sponsored a series of articles intended to flush out anyone still not getting with the program, by suggesting that anyone who does not use FB may be someone you need to worry about, people started wondering if I was some kind of criminal. Who's laughing now? You'll be rejected for that job / promotion / position / venture capital / loan and do you know why? No, you won't because *your not FB's customer- FB's customer is the organization it sells extremely detailed dossiers about your social / political / sexual activity to*, who then decides, based on that dossier, that you're not who they're looking for.
Have a nice life, FB sheeple. Believe me when I say that the "anonymous, aggregate data" FB admits it sells is about as anonymous as a fingerprint after about 30 seconds worth of statistical data mining. And that's just what they admit to, not what they reserve as a right to sell, at their sole discretion after they've unilaterally "updated and amended" their "privacy policy".
Corporations exist to make money for their shareholders. When will people ever learn what that really means. Only your collective will expressed through your government can limit what corporations do to you. Other than that, the sky's the limit. Either you'll pressure your Congressfuck to give you the power to completely delete all your information - at your sole discretion - from online services like FB nor you can spend the rest of your life being profiled right into a ghetto.