The new Facebook Graph Search is in beta, and it will be rolled out soon. In an article on Inquisitr on Friday, Feb. 8, the dangers of the new Graph Search are described, and it paints a frightening picture:
Facebook is like an online personal vault that may contain photos of your firstborn, risky secrets and sometimes your drunken confessions. Police officers, would-be employers and marketers can get access to anything you put there. Now, with Facebook’s new graph search tool, it can give strangers access to who you are, what you like and where you go.
The private information about you is now not only accessible but instantly accessible.
This latest privacy infringement is just the latest in a series of moves by Facebook that require a technically savvy user to stay ahead of the privacy settings that are necessary to protect their privacy. However, this is an opportune time to do a check-up on what you are really sharing through your Facebook account since it will soon be available for instant search to anyone on Facebook, friend or foe.
To begin with, the first place to start is to use this tool provided by Facebook to see what photos of you will be available on Facebook. In the middle of the page, click on “Try Searching for “Photos of Me” in English. You may be surprised by what you see is available for the public to see.
The first thing you may want to do is take care of the photos you do not want available to the common Facebook searcher. If you have a number of photos that others have tagged you in, you only need to untag yourself. There is a Facebook video to the side of this article instructing users how to remove tags from photos.
A visit to your Activity Log is the next required step to remove photos or change their audience. This can be found on the profile page of your Facebook page (click on your name to get there.) After choosing Activity Log, there is a listing, post by post, of all Facebook activity from the opening of the account.
There are also a variety of tools to the left of the page, one of which is photos. This allows you to focus only on photos as you seek to protect your Facebook account. It may be that you want to keep the photos on your Facebook, but make them inaccessible to the new graph search tool. There are very small drop down choices to the right of each entry that allow you to choose who can see the photos: friends, friends of friends, public, only me.
As you go through your entire timeline on the Activity Log, you may want to clean out other personal items you don’t want on there at all. Then, you need to work on getting the settings on your account set to the point that no other personal information will be available to the new Facebook Graph Search.
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