Equality of Conditions

Actual Facebook Graph Searches

nothing to worry about, I’m sure

So Facebook revealed its new search functionality last week to much fanfare. While I understand the power of this data to marketers (and State-run government agencies worldwide), I have a hard time understanding why any person would want this level of search granularity when it comes to their own “likes”, interests and relationships.

Of course I’ve heard about a thousand times,  ”well, I don’t put very much personal info on my profile”. Which is all well and good but then why be on the network in the first place? And for those that do diligently ‘like’ things and keep their profiles chock full of data, will creepy targeted searches like this actually encourage people to REMOVE that valuable personal data?

In other words, is it possible this new powerful Facebook search will encourage people not to share (or actively remove) the goldmine of personal info that makes the search so compelling for marketers?

Disclosure: I quit Facebook about three years ago and can’t stand the fact we have basically the 21st century’s version of AOL in that for an alarming number of people the Internet = Facebook. But that’s a topic for another day and a much longer post.