Mark Zuckerberg knows that when he releases a Facebook update, a key concern on everyone’s mind is privacy. Among his first points, in unveiling Facebook’s new search tool Tuesday, was that “10%” of Facebook’s computing power is devoted to privacy checks.
Maybe so, but “graph search” still presents a new privacy challenge for users. Specifically with photos. Even if users have “hidden” certain photos from their Facebook profiles, a warning message pops up for early testers of the search tool that notes those photos can still appear in search results and on “other places” in Facebook. That begs the question: what did Facebook think users meant to do when they “hid” the photos in the first place.
The good news is that new privacy tools released in December make it easier to figure out exactly which photos are public and gives users tools to scrub them from the site. They’ll want to do that with any incriminating party photos before Facebook search is widely released.