Facebook announced its launch of “Graph Search”. It is yet to receive a full fledged deployment but is already available as beta to selected users. Like most of the changes in Facebook, this one also created a lot of controversy.

Facebook’s Graph Search is released as a beta on January, 2013. It will soon be introduced worldwide. Let see what’s this Graph Search is all about and what are its ramifications once introduced into Facebook.

What is Graph Search?

Graph Search is actually an advancement over the already present search box in Facebook. It searches your social network or social graph in the Facebook, so the results are unique to each user. For queries outside the social network, the search facility will be provided by Microsoft’s Bing.

Facebook Graph Search is a semantic search engine. That means the users can type in the search box just like they are talking to a person. For example if you want to know restaurants around you, type in “what are the Chinese restaurants around here”, just like you ask another person.

What can we do with Graph Search?

So what can we do with this new feature? Facebook maintains that this is a very unique search feature. Unlike Google or Yahoo search, it gives answers rather than a list of links to the user’s question.

Even though Facebook maintains it is no substitute for web search, there is a good chance that it might be a  competition to search engines like Google.

“So its really simple things that people wanna do. They wanna find all the photos they like, photos of two particular people, photos of all their family. They want to find all their friends who live in particular city, because they are going to visit there.

Those are really hard things to find now right now. You have to goto bunch of different pages, you have to piece all the stuff together. And now its easy [using Graph Search], you can say what you want and you get the result.” [Tom Stocky, Product Director, Facebook]

With Graph Search you can pretty much ‘ask’ any question regarding your social network. For example, you can ask:

• My friends who visited Ooty.
• Photos of my friends before college.
• Movies I liked in 2010.
• My friends who work in marketing.
• Cities my family visited.

Graph Search and Concerning Issues

Let’s ask a simple question, ‘Where does Facebook get all this information?’. The answer is simple, ‘Us, the users.’

In fact, all the information available from its one billion users is mined to form a ‘big data’ of social knowledge; and this ‘big data’ is used by the Graph Search to provide answers. The sheer scale of data involved and the nature of data being people’s social information raises some pretty hard questions. privacy, accountability, corporate trust, menace of cyber stalking, cyber bullying etc.

This is not a paranoia, this is clear and present danger that many security experts and privacy advocates warn us about.

Privacy

Just before the Facebook announced ‘Graph Search’, it removed the option for opting out of Facebook searches. So there is no escaping the all seeing eye of Graph Search. But of course, Facebook gives us the option of setting permissions to the content we share. But still, users might find its hard to share information they might consider sensitive.

Some users might have liked certain pictures, pages etc that they might not be proud of anymore. Now going through all that content that is generated years ago might be difficult for users. But Graph Search can bring up that embarrassing content with a simple query.

Social Engineering

Information collected from Graph Search can help a hacker in Social Engineering. He can gather information about employees of his target corporation or even government outfit and use this for his attack.

Social engineering (security) is understood to mean the art of manipulating people into performing actions or divulging confidential information [by acting as someone in power].

With the information from graph search he can search all the employees of his target corporation and gather a lot of information. Then he can perfectly impersonating his target’s superiors and trick him into divulging sensitive information.

Phishing

Phishing is a kind of Social Engineering but requires special attention as it is the most common offense.

Phishing is the an attempt to acquire information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication [creating fake login pages of trusted websites].

The more information a perpetrator knows about his target, more likely he succeeds in his criminal enterprise. Consider a cyber criminal who gathers information about his target like their interests, where they work, websites they visit, friends and family members. Now he is more likely to make a phishing webpage that his targets will fall victim to.

Cyberstalking

Stalking is following a person obsessively and disturbing their privacy(leading to harassment and intimidation). If this happens online it is called Cyberstalking.

Cyberstalking is the use of the web or other electronic means to stalk or harass an individual, a group of individuals, or an organization.

Now, this is more easy. The perpetrator have to gather some information initially after which he can easily locate the targets online presence using Graph Search.

Vigilance and Caution

Users should remain vigilant and exercise caution about what content they share online. Actively checking you privacy settings and judging what you can share online is a good practice. If someone or something is making you uncomfortable involve your parents or friends you trust and talk to them. 

The recent technological advancements made the Internet more of an augmentation to the real world rather than an isolated virtual reality.

Just like you have a right to individuality and privacy in the real world, the same applies to the online world.

What do you think?

Your opinion is important! It’s the users who are at the receiving end of this new feature. What do you think about Graph Search?