Companies such as Facebook and the like undoubtedly draw great power from their "social graph"; however, human interactions are subtle, complex, multifaceted and often contradictory.
Nothing good can come out of applying dumb algorithms (that is, any algorithm) to a sufficiently rich "social graph"; it will always lead to situations like that which are, at best, embarrassing, and at worst, dangerous, for whoever is in the system.
I don't think it's a matter of doing things the right way or fixing them- trying to put human relationships in a computer system will never reproduce the human experience (however, you may make marketers very happy). The best you can do is complete certain very focused subsets of it in an interesting way.
Zuckerberg's views on privacy and openness are laughable, and to be completely expected from someone of his background and world experience. If you think about who the average Facebook employee is, you'd realize that you probably wouldn't want them to be in charge of designing a system meant to model the intricacies of human interaction.
Nothing good can come out of applying dumb algorithms (that is, any algorithm) to a sufficiently rich "social graph"; it will always lead to situations like that which are, at best, embarrassing, and at worst, dangerous, for whoever is in the system.
What does this even mean? The "dumb algorithm" here will (a) take a user's query and (b) search that user's friends and public profiles for hits on that query. What's next: shouting about the robots taking over? Lamenting about how we're all losing our humanity and man weren't things better back in the old days?
I'm really disappointed this is the top comment on HN's top post. Users identified by Graph Search have public accounts and have willingly entered personal information into Facebook. We go thorough this song-and-dance every year: FB updates security policies, everyone is up in arms, then -- gasp! -- everyone updates their security settings. Facebook has a clear transaction with users: build a profile, get sold as eyeballs to advertisers. If you don't like it, then quit.
"With great power comes great responsibility," indeed. People have received numerous warnings about Facebook and privacy, and yet they've chosen to share personal information with everyone they know. At this point the user is responsible for choosing to participate or drop out. Meanwhile, every third HN post includes a commenter, wagging their finger, reminding us in a nasally, know-it-all voice that we're not the customer if we're not paying.
Is Graph Search really that shocking to you--to anyone on HN? Why the hell is anyone up in arms about this in 2013, given what we know about social networks?
> "Nothing good can come out of applying dumb algorithms (that is, any algorithm) to a sufficiently rich "social graph""
These aren't algorithms. This is a search engine - what you put into it is up to you. It can be anywhere from the silliness seen in the link, to "friends who live in London" before you take a trip.
This is just handing people another tool - the uses, and misuses, of said tool are entirely on the users.
> " If you think about who the average Facebook employee is, you'd realize that you probably wouldn't want them to be in charge of designing a system meant to model the intricacies of human interaction."
A snarky and mean-spirited stereotyping of all nerds as socially inept! How clever.
Wow. When Graph Searches were announced, I thought "meh, I'm tired of FB...". I never thought to explore what Graph Searches actually meant. And I would never have done so or will do so, but I'm very glad that someone has investigated the system.
>it will always lead to situations like that which are [bad]
I wonder if there isn't some definition analogous to "Turing complete" for social graphs? i.e. with a sufficiently powerful API, any question can be answered. Just as Turing complete-ness leads to viruses, worms, etc, might "XYZ complete" social networks lead directly and predictably towards A, B and C bad outcomes?
>Zuckerberg's views on privacy and openness are laughable
Perhaps. I'm not versed in them well enough to know. But I wonder if he isn't a bit Bill-Gates-eyan in his perspective of pushing the border between X-Y quite hard to see what bends and what breaks. For Microsoft, it was Code-Data and, while there were certainly people saying don't mix Code and Data!, people happily used their Excel spreadsheets and we suffered mightily from the resulting viruses. Whereas "viruses" were the unintended consequence of mixing Code-Data, are "outings" the result of mixing Social-Search?
Really? Nothing good? From any algorithm at all? How can you be so sure? Amazon seems to do a pretty good job thinking up new stuff I might like with its algorithms, for one.
I hate to flip the script on social networking, but I think google is doing a pretty good job with focusing on exploration and compartmentalization of friends and social groups in +. Maybe something like graph search is their eventual intention, but I really hope their vision is less...disastrous.
> “Islamic men interested in men who live in Tehran, Iran“
This is funny, in Iran people don't quite understand what "interested in" means. In sign up process when they see "interested in" options, they think that means "are you interested in finding friends who are male?" (same for females).
This is because:
1. People use VPN to access Facebook and Facebook can not localize/internationalize their experience.
2. Using translated Facebook sucks(at least translated in Farsi)
3. Concept of homosexual relationships is not known by many iranians because of lack of education.
So there is no wonder if people in Iran marking themself gay while they are not.
Contrary to what a lot of people think, you can change the visibility of likes. This affects Graph Search, Timeline visibility, and also page visibility (I've personally tested these). The Admins of pages you like will still be able to see that you like their page.
Go to the Likes page on your timeline. Click the Edit button in the upper right. Privacy visibility buttons will pop up next to each Like category for you to change the visibility of Likes. Make sure to scroll down to the bottom so you don't miss the last category "Other Pages You Like."
Yes, Facebook intentionally doesn't do a good job of advertising this. For me, though, I'm satisfied that the option is there (and that my option to stalk my friends is there as well).
I appreciate the information, but this misses the point. Facebook hides privacy settings because privacy is bad for their business objectives, and most people will never bother to dig for these settings, leaving them open to the kinds of attacks demonstrated by the original post.
Yes, but one of those searches was for family members of people who supported the Falun Gong. You may live in the US, be a member of the Falun Gong and your grandparents in China get picked up and shipped off for suspected support.
Even if the privacy settings do allow you to opt out of being visible in Graph Search (and there is an open question of if it would for a query that returns other people instead of you), now people's safety is involved for something they themselves have no control over.
Maybe this seems horrible right now, but Facebook didn't create these problems and contradictions, it just exposed them uncomfortably. I expect that the eventual abuses springing from this exposure will spur a counterreaction, hopefully with net-positive results. After all, what's the most meaningful take-away from this? Is it that Facebook is endangering individuals? Not really. Powerful, global social search tools like this were bound to happen eventually. The potential benefits of integrative technologies like this are just too great to ignore. No, the real take-away is this: sexual freedoms suck in Iran. Religious freedoms suck in China. And lots of people have embarrassing and/or contradictory and/or naive views and tastes.
So all this tells me is that we should focus on improving sexual freedoms in Iran and religious freedoms in China. Hopefully the people with embarrassing views will take care of themselves as tools such as this subject them to increasing scrutiny.
> Is it that Facebook is endangering individuals? Not really.
They most certainly are! Facebook keeps changing the rules of the game. There is a reason why so many countries have Ex post facto law. Facebook, by contract, ends up focusing on Ex post facto exploitation. Would people have put in these likes on the same account had they known that FB would create a search that would let anyone, anywhere do a simple query that exposes them in some way?
Short term this may be a problem, but long term it's probably a good thing. Hopefully once people become aware of what they're exposing they'll become more cautious.
Complaining about News Feed and Graph Search is basically saying you're ok with "security through obscurity". If I understand correctly, all of this information is already available to those who want to dig deep enough.
While it's (probably) true that the information is already available, it's not easily available.
If it's going to take me 25 days of tedious profile reading to find people who I seek (e.g. "Lesbian women from Greece who like Doritos"), I'm not going to do it. It's not practically available.
Graph Search changes that. Obscurity vanishes, along with any security it provided.
Where's the EFF Panopticlick for your FB likes? To tell you how well you stick out or blend in with the crowd? (though blending in with the crowd is just security through obscurity...)
A couple days ago someone was asking for an automated FB deliker app/service, to automatically unlike everything you've liked on FB.
It's ironic -- the "anonymization" technique of pixelating the image and blanking the names doesn't really work anymore: one can easily just search by the other attributes to find the people again, there is enough entropy in that data.
The whole point of the site (other than lulz) is to highlight the privacy problems of Facebook, they obviously aren't going to completely protect the people who show up in those searches. What the blurring does is prevents the top 3-4 people in the results at the time of the search from being unfairly highlighted, and it doesn't keep any historical record of the people should they take steps to remove themselves from these results.
I think the anonymization, while not perfect, is enough to be considered ethical.
That's true. I do consider it polite though not to display their names openly on the site. It gives these people a chance to change their preferences and hide from future searches for instance.
Interesting concept... showing courtesy for strangers you find in search results...
I'm willing to bet that APIs will eventually expose searching the text of posts, not just "Likes". Sure, it'll be introduced with examples of better ways to find people with common interests, but inevitably it'll expose even privacy protected posts to bad actors (e.g. Big Brother Police State, Ad companies who pay a premium, etc).
Is anyone willing to argue that in the future it won't be possible to query something like "find recently single women who are bipolar (i.e. frequent dramatic changes of mood/tone in wall status posts), high school dropouts, without a living father, and are easily impressed by nice cars"
The sad thing is that all the data are already in FB databases to answer queries like the above. All that's preventing mining that data is ever changing ToCs and government laws.
The notion that the government doesn't already have access to all that data is absurd. Facebook has shown an eagerness to cooperate with governments and law enforcement in the past and I would be extremely surprised to learn that they're not already selling or giving away data to government for large-scale data mining operations.
This is bad news all around. It is likely a huge percentage of searches performed by people will not enrich lives but most people will use it to mine out insights that others don't wish to be publicized.
Can you imagine people being rounded up in China over this and put into prisons over their "like".
I don't know if it's enough, but I just removed nearly any interest that I liked "i.e. removed snowboarding, hip-hop', etc. along with other stuff that's just promotional fluff. I may not be able to avoid the social graph altogether but I'd like to limit the kind of searches I appear in.
Maybe it's just me, but the FB Graph Search intro video seemed to be more of an objective-based searching tool. I (probably stupidly) assumed it could serve as a sidekick to Google search. Forgot that the majority of Facebook users use the default search to find (stalk) other people, and this is just an engine to do it more efficiently. I'm starting to be a bit wary about the monetization potential of FB Graph Search.
It completely blows my mind. I am totally confused as to what Facebook does for people for them to take this stuff on a monthly basis.
As for this new search: What happens when people pop up on this search even when they have nothing in common with the question being asked? I really might my family to deactivate for a while at least until this thing is better understood.
I see this as similar to those shady websites that scrape for personal information, then aggregate them. Not the shadiness, but the same principle of gathering information that has already been available, but now simply exposing it in one neat package. And it's very frightening. Can you imagine in a few years where scrapers can take this kind of logic and build databases of people's "online footprints" based on aliases they have used in the past by searching for references to emails they registered with, or mentioned in comments? Add textual analysis of their comments, and all bets are off.
The searches depicted are more telling about the person making the search rather than the supposed "victims". Nothing to see here, unless you buy into stereotypical fearmongering or are "shocked" that humans are human.
You don't seem to understand the power information has over people's lives. Have you ever disclosed information to some of your friends that you wouldn't disclose to the general public? What about information that could get you arrested or executed? This is real.
So it turns out Graph Search is not at all what I thought it was. I thought it would infer information about people that they did not explicitly type in (inferred semantics) to complete my search. In actuality, it looks like a GUI for SQL.
At first glance, it almost seems as if they turned the various segmenting functions in Facebook ads into Graph Search. Except you can now see in much more detail who those people actually are.
[+] [-] GuiA|13 years ago|reply
Companies such as Facebook and the like undoubtedly draw great power from their "social graph"; however, human interactions are subtle, complex, multifaceted and often contradictory.
Nothing good can come out of applying dumb algorithms (that is, any algorithm) to a sufficiently rich "social graph"; it will always lead to situations like that which are, at best, embarrassing, and at worst, dangerous, for whoever is in the system.
I don't think it's a matter of doing things the right way or fixing them- trying to put human relationships in a computer system will never reproduce the human experience (however, you may make marketers very happy). The best you can do is complete certain very focused subsets of it in an interesting way.
Zuckerberg's views on privacy and openness are laughable, and to be completely expected from someone of his background and world experience. If you think about who the average Facebook employee is, you'd realize that you probably wouldn't want them to be in charge of designing a system meant to model the intricacies of human interaction.
[+] [-] achompas|13 years ago|reply
What does this even mean? The "dumb algorithm" here will (a) take a user's query and (b) search that user's friends and public profiles for hits on that query. What's next: shouting about the robots taking over? Lamenting about how we're all losing our humanity and man weren't things better back in the old days?
I'm really disappointed this is the top comment on HN's top post. Users identified by Graph Search have public accounts and have willingly entered personal information into Facebook. We go thorough this song-and-dance every year: FB updates security policies, everyone is up in arms, then -- gasp! -- everyone updates their security settings. Facebook has a clear transaction with users: build a profile, get sold as eyeballs to advertisers. If you don't like it, then quit.
"With great power comes great responsibility," indeed. People have received numerous warnings about Facebook and privacy, and yet they've chosen to share personal information with everyone they know. At this point the user is responsible for choosing to participate or drop out. Meanwhile, every third HN post includes a commenter, wagging their finger, reminding us in a nasally, know-it-all voice that we're not the customer if we're not paying.
Is Graph Search really that shocking to you--to anyone on HN? Why the hell is anyone up in arms about this in 2013, given what we know about social networks?
[+] [-] potatolicious|13 years ago|reply
These aren't algorithms. This is a search engine - what you put into it is up to you. It can be anywhere from the silliness seen in the link, to "friends who live in London" before you take a trip.
This is just handing people another tool - the uses, and misuses, of said tool are entirely on the users.
> " If you think about who the average Facebook employee is, you'd realize that you probably wouldn't want them to be in charge of designing a system meant to model the intricacies of human interaction."
A snarky and mean-spirited stereotyping of all nerds as socially inept! How clever.
[+] [-] CoffeeDregs|13 years ago|reply
>it will always lead to situations like that which are [bad]
I wonder if there isn't some definition analogous to "Turing complete" for social graphs? i.e. with a sufficiently powerful API, any question can be answered. Just as Turing complete-ness leads to viruses, worms, etc, might "XYZ complete" social networks lead directly and predictably towards A, B and C bad outcomes?
>Zuckerberg's views on privacy and openness are laughable
Perhaps. I'm not versed in them well enough to know. But I wonder if he isn't a bit Bill-Gates-eyan in his perspective of pushing the border between X-Y quite hard to see what bends and what breaks. For Microsoft, it was Code-Data and, while there were certainly people saying don't mix Code and Data!, people happily used their Excel spreadsheets and we suffered mightily from the resulting viruses. Whereas "viruses" were the unintended consequence of mixing Code-Data, are "outings" the result of mixing Social-Search?
[+] [-] corporalagumbo|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] psbp|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] veemjeem|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] msoad|13 years ago|reply
This is funny, in Iran people don't quite understand what "interested in" means. In sign up process when they see "interested in" options, they think that means "are you interested in finding friends who are male?" (same for females). This is because:
1. People use VPN to access Facebook and Facebook can not localize/internationalize their experience.
2. Using translated Facebook sucks(at least translated in Farsi)
3. Concept of homosexual relationships is not known by many iranians because of lack of education.
So there is no wonder if people in Iran marking themself gay while they are not.
(with all respect to gay people)
[+] [-] joshschreuder|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oh_sigh|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] camus|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brianchu|13 years ago|reply
Go to the Likes page on your timeline. Click the Edit button in the upper right. Privacy visibility buttons will pop up next to each Like category for you to change the visibility of Likes. Make sure to scroll down to the bottom so you don't miss the last category "Other Pages You Like."
Yes, Facebook intentionally doesn't do a good job of advertising this. For me, though, I'm satisfied that the option is there (and that my option to stalk my friends is there as well).
[+] [-] beatpanda|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aloisius|13 years ago|reply
Even if the privacy settings do allow you to opt out of being visible in Graph Search (and there is an open question of if it would for a query that returns other people instead of you), now people's safety is involved for something they themselves have no control over.
[+] [-] driverdan|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] corporalagumbo|13 years ago|reply
So all this tells me is that we should focus on improving sexual freedoms in Iran and religious freedoms in China. Hopefully the people with embarrassing views will take care of themselves as tools such as this subject them to increasing scrutiny.
[+] [-] flyinRyan|13 years ago|reply
They most certainly are! Facebook keeps changing the rules of the game. There is a reason why so many countries have Ex post facto law. Facebook, by contract, ends up focusing on Ex post facto exploitation. Would people have put in these likes on the same account had they known that FB would create a search that would let anyone, anywhere do a simple query that exposes them in some way?
[+] [-] politician|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lhnn|13 years ago|reply
That they should be keeping off the Internet.
[+] [-] tlrobinson|13 years ago|reply
Complaining about News Feed and Graph Search is basically saying you're ok with "security through obscurity". If I understand correctly, all of this information is already available to those who want to dig deep enough.
[+] [-] troymc|13 years ago|reply
If it's going to take me 25 days of tedious profile reading to find people who I seek (e.g. "Lesbian women from Greece who like Doritos"), I'm not going to do it. It's not practically available.
Graph Search changes that. Obscurity vanishes, along with any security it provided.
[+] [-] flyinRyan|13 years ago|reply
You already said you were ok with "security through obscurity" when you logged in with a password.
[+] [-] misiti3780|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] harlanlewis|13 years ago|reply
And: ”When users recognize or fear that their privacy or confidentiality is compromised, true freedom of inquiry no longer exists.”
- American Library Association, http://www.ala.org/Template.cfm?Section=interpretations&...
[+] [-] stephengillie|13 years ago|reply
A couple days ago someone was asking for an automated FB deliker app/service, to automatically unlike everything you've liked on FB.
[+] [-] ______|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notatoad|13 years ago|reply
I think the anonymization, while not perfect, is enough to be considered ethical.
[+] [-] corporalagumbo|13 years ago|reply
Interesting concept... showing courtesy for strangers you find in search results...
[+] [-] mcphilip|13 years ago|reply
Is anyone willing to argue that in the future it won't be possible to query something like "find recently single women who are bipolar (i.e. frequent dramatic changes of mood/tone in wall status posts), high school dropouts, without a living father, and are easily impressed by nice cars"
The sad thing is that all the data are already in FB databases to answer queries like the above. All that's preventing mining that data is ever changing ToCs and government laws.
[+] [-] beatpanda|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] electic|13 years ago|reply
Can you imagine people being rounded up in China over this and put into prisons over their "like".
[+] [-] aaronbrethorst|13 years ago|reply
People who like Barack Obama and Mitt Romney: https://www.facebook.com/search/6815841748/likers/2139280112...
People who like MPAA and The Pirate Bay: https://www.facebook.com/search/108476252505746/likers/11101...
[+] [-] mseebach|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] artmageddon|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aviswanathan|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MrMan|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] VeejayRampay|13 years ago|reply
http://readwrite.com/2012/12/11/why-are-dead-people-liking-s...
[+] [-] crowhack|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ladzoppelin|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Apocryphon|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] achompas|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] return0|13 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] rdl|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acchow|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmcy22|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] VeejayRampay|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] psbp|13 years ago|reply