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."

Comments

Re:Yeah, right

[Anonymous Coward]

Absolutely! I am not active on Facebook. I talked to a brother in Chicago and a friend in Louisiana. I have never logged into Facebook from an ip address that would geo locate me to my home state. Mobile ip, proxies or tor (or combinations of the three). And always from a Linux live cd, so no cookies from anywhere else.

Social media is blocked at my home and work, I can't accidentally login. Nothing in my login history says I live where I do. It says the opposite. Yes, I have an overly paranoid account.

One day I turned off my ad blocking software and found quite a few personalized ads for my location, and it confused me quite a bit. How? When i did that a year before, Facebook thought I lived across the country and frequently traveled.

My best explanation is that I gave the friend in LA my phone number (in person) and when she added it to her contact book, a Facebook sync confirmed my number as matching me. She possibly added my real birthdate and more.I put that data into any form and it now matches that account. So although I have never given Facebook any more useful data than my (very common) name, they now have enough info to match me on anything in real databases.

As someone who has tried their hardest to fudge databases with false info, there is no use. They will get the data some other way and then fill in the rest. As it has been mentioned before, even if you don't have an account you will have a ghost profile in the database if your name is in someone else's contact book. A fake name does nothing if 20 of your friends or relatives list you as your real name in their contact books and they sync.

Re:So?

[sphealey]

= = = More to the point, privacy is an illusion we create to hide us from ourselves. If you really want "privacy" then go hide in a cave all by yourself. If you want to keep secrets, don't tell anyone else. The moment you tell someone something you've lost control of that information. The internet just makes it easier to lose control of information. = = =

Try using your small business account to order up a Choicepoint profile of one Richard Cheney and see how far that theory takes you. If privacy is such an unimportant illusion why does every high-ranking corporate and government official have access to their records not only blocked but set up for immediate counterattack on access?

sPh