Remember those nasty comments you wrote long ago about an ex-boyfriend? What about that photo of you and your college friends holding shot glasses to the camera? Want your current family and friends to easily find them? As TechCrunch writer Josh Constine says in a recent story, Facebook’s new Graph Search may make it easier than ever for people to unearth those long-forgotten but extremely embarrassing Facebook posts.
A powerful new search
Facebook recently rolled out its new Graph Search to a small number of U.S. users who search in English. This means that people can search your former posts by status updates, comments, photo captions, notes and check-ins. This will make it easy to search your family and friends for specific comments or photos. But, is there a downside to this advanced new Graph Search?
Uh-Oh moments?
You might want to keep these posts in the past. But Graph Search renders that a difficult task. And that’s something to keep in mind any time you post something on Facebook: Do you want others seeing that photo or reading that comment a decade from now?
Obscurity obliterated
As Constine writes, users expected some privacy from Facebook through obscurity. In other words, other users weren’t very likely to dig through years of past posts on your Facebook site to locate that embarrassing bachelor-party photo. Using this new advanced Graph Search, though, that privacy by obscurity protection is pretty much obliterated. The message here, as always, is be careful what you post on Facebook.