Facebook Graph Search could interfere with your online privacy

Three months ago Facebook revealed Graph Search which had a lot of mixed reviews. While some reviewers considered it to be a great marketing tool for direct messages, others expressed that it could bring huge security concerns with it.

What is Graph Search?

Touted to be the ultimate search tool that collates quality information from your friends’ interests, likes, check-ins and photos, and allows you to explore new things. This toll can also be used to look for all the photos that you’ve been tagged in since joining Facebook. It could replace LinkedIn for creating professional connections or burrp.com (Let it out!) for miscellaneous searches.

It does sound like a terrific idea, doesn’t it? Who wouldn’t want a suggestion liked and selected by a friend? On the surface, yes, it does sound great but if you dig deeper, you might want to reconsider what you post and like on Facebook.

The Tumblr blog gives a good idea of what an Actual Graph Search can turn out to be. Here’s a sample:

Pretty nosy, isn’t it!

What the tool actually does is throw a lot of your old Facebook content and interests (Photos, posts, tags, likes etc.) to the public. For all the late adopters of the updated News Feed and Timeline, this could mean a lot of unwanted content coming out of obscurity.

So, what do you do? Take a step by step approach.

First – Editing your Likes.

You can edit the visibility settings on your Likes page so that only you or your friends can see what you have liked.

After you log in click the Likes box on your profile. You’ll land on a page that looks like the screenshot below. Click the edit button in the upper right hand corner.

Each category, you will see a drop down menu that lets you decide who can see what.

Click Done Editing to save your changes.

Second – Removing unwanted Tags from Photos.

You can use settings for Photos to reduce the chances of an unwanted photo popping up.

Select the Photo tab on the left side of your Home page.

This will take you to a page that shows the list of photos that you’ve been tagged in. Select the Options tab located at the bottom of the image and choose ‘Report/Remove Tag’. This allows you to remove tags from each image.  

Do remember that Graph Search is still in its beta phase, this implies that there could be further changes and alterations. If you have any insights regarding the same, we would love to hear them.

Soumya Patnaik