It had been long that we heard something from Facebook regarding an update and finally the largest social networking site is back into the news for its new service, that is Facebook Graph Search. Although the idea was introduced late back in January 2013, it is only now that the service is live for the users. Facebook graph search feature holds significant importance for the team as well as Mark Zuckerberg declared it to the be the third pillar of Facebook. However, just like all other features been introduced by Facebook previously, Graph search too, has got all the potential to disturb your privacy concerns and it is really important for you to understand what actually graph search is all about and how shall you manage your settings to ensure your privacy.
What is Facebook Graph Search?
The service works as a new search engine which will now enable you to ask questions from Facebook and get answers from its strongly integrated database which will offer you results of the query you made in your search. How about asking your search engine about how many of your friends love to eat pizza or how many of your friends live in Karachi? If you have gotten the point, try searching similar questions in your search bar and enjoy finding a classified list of friends who match the criteria you mentioned.
Adding more charm to the service, Facebook has also integrated its search with MSN’s bing which will further ensure a better search result.
What to know more about the availability of the service?
The feature is now available to most of the FB users who are using Facebook in English (U.S). The feature was automatically added to all such profiles from Monday after the news of availability of the service was brought in notice.
You will see a message box just beside your settings the moment you will log in to your profile. On clicking on the message box, the page is redirected to Facebook graph search from where you can learn more about the service.
How to Control Who Sees your Profile?
As a result of this milestone been achieved by Facebook, your privacy has encountered a new risk of coming into notice of people you really don’t want to let know about you and your personal information.
It is important to remember here that by default, you are shown open for Graph searching, which means that if a friend of yours try to search things about the category you also fall in, you will also be appearing in the result.
It is strongly recommended to change your privacy settings according to what suits you the best and to make it easier for you, here is a quick tutorial to set up privacy control to see who can see your profile.
Now that you know it all about Facebook graph search, play it safe and enjoy searching your friends and much more about them, differently.
Share your views about the third pillar of Facebook,
Wishes,
I don’t know why facebook is making things difficult for its users. Similarly the user information is submitted to marketing companies in form of marketing research data. This is irritating :/
I got the graph search update on my profile 3-4 days ago but I havn’t still checked my privacy setting. Your post made me realize to check and change the settings.
Thanks Nida 🙂
Tarun, make sure you go through the process asap.
Users on FB are already found complaining over the issue
If this is the case, then Graph Search is big hurdle in Facebook users privacy, Facebook has been failed many times, in protecting the Privacy of every individual on FB.