- “Current employers of people who like Racism”
- “Spouses of married people who like [cheat-on-your-partner dating site] Ashley Madison”
- “Family members of people who live in China and like [the very very banned] Falun Gong”
- “Islamic men interested in men who live in Tehran, Iran”
- “People who like Focus on the Family [anti gay marriage] and Neil Patrick Harris [very gay and due to be married with kids]”
- “Single women who live nearby and who are interested in men and like Getting Drunk”
- “Mothers of Catholics from Italy who like Durex”
The exposure of this information in this form isn’t a matter of private information being breached; instead it’s a matter of obscurity being reduced — a differentiation well explored by Woodrow Harzog and Evan Sellinger in The Atlantic. Increasingly, in this age of big data, better search tools, and ease of posting information, we’re encountering more and more often discomfort around the idea of public data being made more public, as a New York newspaper discovered when it put public information about who had guns into an interactive map. Lots of people shot off about that one, including lawmakers, leading the newspaper to take down the map.
Tumblr creator Tom Scott realizes the issue isn’t explicitly a privacy one.
“I’m not sure I’m making any deeper point about privacy: I think, at this point, we’re basically all just rubbernecking – myself included,” says Scott by email. “Facebook does have good privacy settings: but there are many, many people who don’t know how to use them!”
That is a problem, and one that Graph Search could potentially help solve by demonstrating to people how public much of their content really is if they haven’t fooled around with their privacy settings.
“People are confused about their settings. Facebook has changed them so many times. If you haven’t locked down your privacy settings before, you should do it now,” says consumer privacy expert Justin Brookman of the Center for Democracy and Technology. “There’s a lagging awareness as to whether information should be public in the first place. The positive result of all this, though, is that people are becoming less and less stupid about information sharing. We’re catching up and we’re getting better.”
Though some people, like Ryan Tate of Wired, will likely want to share more because of Graph, because it just became a much more useful vehicle for searching for information about venues, restaurants, and vacation spots.
Another problem with all this is the expectation we bring to the data. We’re looking at these results as if all of this information is accurate, and that’s almost certainly wrong.
“There’s the fact that Facebook ‘likes’ and profile settings aren’t necessarily accurate reflections of reality,” writes Will Oremus at Slate. As commenter Julie Popp remarked on my last Facebook article in a seemingly endless series about the downsides of ‘Liking’:
A common joke among the males (especially freshman year) in a group of friends was to hack each others’ Facebook accounts when they left their computer unattended. Then the hacker would “like” incredible amounts of things that were usually funny, opposite of the victim’s political views, really awful boy bands or romantic comedies. It was all in good jest.It’s all fun and games until your friend’s photo winds up on Gizmodo’s front page
Source: www.forbes.com by Kashmir Hill
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