Facebook has a new tool that lets you search for people based on their Facebook activity. It’s called Graph Search, and it’s gradually becoming available to every Facebook user on the planet. Once you have access—there’s a waiting list—you’ll be able to use it to find information such as restaurants your friends have liked, old photos containing specific family members, and alumni from your alma mater who live near your next vacation spot.

It promises to be a powerful tool for analyzing the personal data many people publish on Facebook—and that means you need to know how it works and how to prevent it from accessing data you’d prefer to keep private.

Review your Facebook privacy settings

The Graph Search tool is a work in progress and the service isn’t available to all Facebook users yet, but it still represents a good opportunity to revisit your Facebook privacy settings. To get there, log in to Facebook, click the blue cog icon in the top-right corner, and select Privacy Settings. From here, you can monitor who can see your Facebook updates and retroactively set limits on your past posts—a handy trick for quickly locking down your Facebook page.

You should also browse through your Activity Log to get an idea of how much Facebook records (hint: pretty much everything you do) and who has access to that data. I was surprised to discover that Facebook has been logging my search queries for months, making it easy for anyone to see whose profiles I look at (rather than clicking and sorting through my friends list for someone, I often just type a name into the search field and go from there).

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here