The Creepy Details of Facebook's New Graph Search

<i>This feature has rolled everyone, by default, into a dating service ("Single females in San Francisco who like Radiohead") and a marketing database ("People under 25 who like Coca-Cola").</i><p>This assumes that the advertisers didn't have access to searches like this already. That seems very unlikely.

I personally think this feature is really cool, and has the capacity to be really useful. While I don't personally mind people creeping me, it <i>will</i> likely have vast social implications.<p>For example: <a href="https://dl.dropbox.com/u/46245195/jealousy-machine.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://dl.dropbox.com/u/46245195/jealousy-machine.jpg</a>

Seems to me like Facebook was already using these "creepy details" on a daily basis in targeted advertisements. I looked through the ad process, and you could choose any of the options they have in the article (age range, likes, location, etc.)

This at least exposes what you could have been doing all along using their API. If anything it is better that they launch this and people realize the implications rather than developers being able to do it without people really understanding the implications.

Privacy and utility are mutually exclusive, privacy and utility are mutually exclusive.<p>This can't be said often enough.<p>I personally hate Facebook because of Zuckerberg's disregard for Steve Jobs's definition of privacy: to know what you've signed up for.<p>But there's definitely a lot of utility for those who willingly hand over their personal information. It's a trade-off, and I'm fine with it, as long as people knowingly, willingly accept that.

I really like it. The constantly increasing social pervasiveness is inevitable and I've made my peace with it a long time ago.<p>I understand why it took them this long to come out with something like this. For this to work, you need massive amounts of data, something Facebook has plenty of after receiving a firehose of data for so many years.<p>Google has failed in social search, because (ironically) they had the search first, but not the data. IMHO this is exactly what they were afraid of and the main reason why they keep pushing on G+ hard.<p>Most importantly, Graph Search finally "captures the intent" - which made Adwords so good - that FB Ads was badly missing. Expect to see their revenues soaring in the coming years.

Wasn't it Assange that said fb was the greatest spying machine ever invented? Why the heck people will continuously give away private information with no safeguard that information will ever remain private in the future, I will never understand. Graph Search is just one more example of 'transparency creep' until there is only a microcosm of privacy left, and even that will likely be an illusion.

Think about what this will do for discriminatory hiring. Searches on who has liked political statements or views that are disapproved of by corporate policy. Again as others have state - big difference between this stuff being discoverable and it being easily searched, sliced and diced.

One thing you should know is, the search has become more easy rather than typing some name in search and selecting "education,location,workplace". SO, the search i believe has now been turned out more like ruby syntax.

Just so I understand this correct, if everyone is only sharing things explicitly with friends or friends of friends, doesn't that render the open social graph search useless?