About a year or so ago, I decided to quit my experiment with facebook - for a variety of reasons that I wrote a post about at the time. It has grown surreptitiously from a tool that simply helped connect people to something more nefarious, (or so it appears to my reptilian brain) - but don't take my word for it.
Tech commentator Tom Scott, who is among those invited to test Graph Search, a new feature, demonstrated what he found using Graph Search on this page: .. [it] has served up lists of family members of people who live in China and like Falun Gong, people who like the extreme rightwing group English Defence League but also enjoy a curry, and Islamic men who are interested in other men and live in Tehran, where homosexuality is persecuted. Other lists included Tesco employees who like horses, a reference to the discovery of horse DNA in burgers sold by the supermarket chain, and spouses of people who like Ashley Madison, a dating site for people already in relationships.
Are you male, & interested in searching for single women in your area who are looking for men & 'like' getting drunk? Or some more insidious ones that I won't even mention here? Easy peasy! How much information about you/ your kids do you want strangers to know?
The implications are far more serious than some harmless searches, but I will leave that to the newspaper headlines that will no doubt hit us soon enough. The Guardian & the Slate weigh in with their thoughts.
This is how to change your privacy settings if you want to stay on facebook. Better still, this is how you delete your account. And download a copy of your data before you do so.
