By Kashmir Hill, Forbes Staff When Facebook launched its social search engine “Graph Search” last week, I suggested that Facebook stalking would now be limited only by users’ creativity in coming up with search queries. Well, congratulations to Tom Scott who has won the creativity prize with his Tumblr, Actual Facebook Graph Searches. He’s posting and crowd-sourcing a series of searches that surface potentially embarrassing, hypocritical, threatening or unsavory information about Facebook users, such as: “Current employers of people who like Racism” “Spouses of married people who like [cheat-on-your-partner dating site] Ashley Madison” “Family members of people who live in China and like [the very very banned] Falun Gong” “Islamic men interested in men who live in Tehran, Iran” “People who like Focus on the Family [anti gay marriage] and Neil Patrick Harris [very gay and due to be married with kids]” “Single women who live nearby and who are interested in men and like Getting Drunk” “Mothers of Catholics from Italy who like Durex” There is no private information unintentionally exposed here. It isn’t as Gizmodo quipped in a post last week that “people are now sharing horrible things about themselves thanks to Facebook Search.” They were already sharing these things. These are simply interesting juxtapositions of public information that was previously harder to access and display. For example, one could have gone to the public “Racism” page and looked at a list of everyone who liked it (hopefully ironically) and then looked through their profiles to figure out who their employers were, but it involved more steps. Facebook has simply done what any good tech company should do — remove those onerous steps and make it much easier to find out who’s racist, who’s cheating, who wants to get drunk tonight, or, perhaps best of all, all of the above.
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