Depending on your tolerance for personal exposure, you may love it or hate Facebook's new Graph Search. What makes it most interesting, and perhaps most insidious, is the way it's set up to let users mix and match search terms to make new discoveries. Soyou Like a random website? Big deal. What might a list of all the websites you've ever Liked say about you though?
Facebook Graph Search is coming, and now -- before it hits -- is a good time to tweak your Facebook privacy settings.What is it?Graph Search is a new search function within Facebook. It's not yet been officially launched yet, but it is available in Beta. Graph Search differs from existing Facebook search functions becauseinstead of just indexing bits of information, it indexes a large number of connections between pieces of information.For example, Facebook's search functionality now provides people,places and things. The initial phaseof Graph Search will provide the relationships between people, places and photos as well.Some Graph Search term examples, provided by Facebook on its website: "people who like cycling who are from my hometown"; "restaurants in London my friends have been to";"photos I like"; and "music my friends like."Essentially, with Graph Search you will be able to look up and get results for anything shared with you on Facebook, and others will be able to do the same with thingsyou've shared with them.What Is Indexed in Graph?Content set to Public will be searchable. People will be findablebased on things they've shared with you, including interests and items within their profile -- for example, friends who have shared their city with you, or friends whose city is public.Photos will findable by you if you -- or friends -- have posted or tagged them. Others will see any photos they can normally see, including photos hidden from the timeline.Your location tags will be searchable.What's the Problem?What's the problem with all this? There isn't one if you believe that searching for and finding connections is an integral part of the future of social networking.However, if your attitude toward privacy runs a bit more on the old-school side, you can control some of this information, including who can see your currentcity. Control can include reporting or removing photo tags; deleting photos; and removing location tags.
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