Popular Facebook Graph Search is privacy breach

You can go around looking like you have been sleeping rough on the streets for an year, and people won’t doubt your mental abilities. But mention that you are not on Facebook and they look at you like you are the craziest person they have ever met. The harder part used to be explaining to people why I am not on Facebook in the first place. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, just made it easier for me by introducing a new feature called ‘Graph Search’.

Actually, I have been working myself up about Facebook ever since it released the ‘Poke’ mobile app a few weeks ago which was a clone of the popular ‘Snapchat’ app whose founders are rumoured to have rebuffed Zuckerberg’s acquisition efforts. That now infamous Poke app lets you send self-destructing messages to your Facebook contacts. Among other uses, this self-destruct feature is aimed at teenagers or for that matter anyone who likes ‘sexting’. My problem with Poke was not that it is encouraging sexting. My problem was that a company like Facebook with all the money, resources, and most importantly data cannot think of throwing those resources at nothing better than a sexting app. Apparently, Zuckerberg heard my inner voice and promptly introduced the ‘Graph Search’, which has the potential to change the world. Except now I am not sure that change is for good.

To put it in the simplest terms, Graph Search is the equivalent of Google Search, except you can use it only to search data on Facebook, whereas Google Search is used to search the world wide web. Again unlike Google Search you can use natural language to search for data. For now in limited public Beta, Graph Search will soon roll out to the general public and will let you search for things that you never thought were possible. Books liked by people in your college. Your friend’s favourite restaurants. Your friend’s friends who live in Mumbai and who like partying. Single women near you.

As the first few examples show, Graph Search has enormous potential to change the world. Every minute, hundreds of millions of people are voluntarily providing Facebook with their personal data, and their likes and dislikes. Any Facebook user can sit in a small provincial town in India and can access all that data. With one stroke, Facebook becomes a better search engine than Google because it accesses all its users data that Google can only dream of getting near. It also has the potential to replace the likes of LinkedIn, Yelp and other such social data-driven networks putting enormous power in the hands of one company.

More than the power though, the p-word we should be worried about because of Graph Search is privacy. When you can search for anything and everything about people’s personal data, the possibility of privacy breach is just around the corner. The already popular ‘Actual Facebook Graph Searches’ has people searching for ‘Islamic men interested in men who live in Tehran, Iran and places they work’, ‘single women who live nearby and like getting drunk’ etceteras. Guess how you would feel if because of something you ‘liked’ a few years ago, Facebook starts showing your profile when people search for ‘men who like sexism’. So here is a piece of advice. Either lock down your privacy settings with a big padlock, or just quit Facebook. The writer is a tech geek.

 Email: articles@theadarsh.net