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Social Media Quick Tip: Facebook’s ‘Graph Search’ Raises Privacy Concerns

Home » Social Media Quick Tip: Facebook’s ‘Graph Search’ Raises Privacy Concerns

Connected Cops, Lauri Stevens, Pam Armstrong | 1,398 comments

Facebook rolled out what it calls “graph search” last week, effectively turning user profiles inside out. Graph search was announced earlier this year but rolled out to the masses a few days ago. Facebook has a page on how graph search affects privacy, but surprise, surprise, they leave a lot out.

The best way to understand it is to try a few searches. As examples, put in “police officers who live in ” or “photos of ” and see the wealth of information you get. The important thing to understand is that each search is tailored to each user. So two people making the same searches will get different results. It all depends on how the searcher is personally linked to the subjects being searched.

Graph search doesn’t allow people to see any more than they would be able to otherwise, but it certainly makes it easier to find it and serves it all up at once. This is all the more reason to make sure your Facebook settings are locked down on your personal profiles.

Have you hidden your friends lists and your “likes” to prying eyes? Have you set your tagging so you can review tags of yourself and turned off facial recognition? Have you managed the settings of what others share about you? Have you prevented search engines from linking to your timeline? Have you gone through your entire timeline and limited the audience, deleted them or untagged yourself in photos? Have you limited who sees your future posts? If this sounds foreign to you, you’re likely open to the world.

And make no mistake, Facebook is sure to be adding to what information it can pull about its members into the graph search. Imagine if facial recognition is added, then all those photos your friends and family have posted of you that you think no one will ever see are suddenly fair game. Furthermore, there is no setting to opt out of graph search.

Graph search also has huge implications on child crimes. Facebook prevents profiles with ages set under 18 from being searchable by adults. But, as you know, stalkers and sexual predators create fake profiles anyway. If they set their age setting to between 13 and 17, graph search will present them a far greater access to potential victims.

Of course, the flip side is, this works in an investigator’s favor as well.

This Social Media Quick Tip was previously published on LawOfficer.com

 

1,398 comments