New Facebook Privacy Concerns: What You Can Do About It?

Facebook's new social search engine, Graph Search, is raising some privacy concerns as the new feature slowly rolls out to more and more Facebook users. 

There are several reason why Graph Search have privacy advocates and Facebook users concerned. First of all, you cannot simply opt out of the Graph Search: it's being rolled out as a core feature (perhaps soon the core feature), and this is concerning for the aforementioned reason, but also has a bright side for private people. 

Your control over what the Graph Search exposes about you in the same intuitive way you control what else Facebook shows about your profile. That is, what you make visible to only friends will only be graph searchable by them. What you make public is public. 

Secondly, Graph Search will be able to search through your previous activity on Facebook, unless you change those settings, too. Facebook has an Activity Log that is a complete list of every app you've connected through Facebook, as well as everything you posted and every photo you were tagged in by friends. You can either go through and alter who can see each post or photo, or you can set all of your previous activity to a more private setting by changing the option labeled "Limit the Audience for Past Posts" in your privacy settings (Warning, this cannot be undone). 

One last consideration: If you're the type of person who is often photographed, posted, and tagged by friends without your input, now would be a good time to consider what types of situations and actions your friends are photographing you and tagging you in. This goes back to the (at least) 5 year old PSA posters hung in every college career councilor's office warning that compromising or unsavory photos can lose you a potential job - it's just now those photos can be found with one 5-second search. 

TechCrunch and WSJ