Facebook Testing Advanced Search Feature on Mobile, Allows Your Friends To Dig Up Your Past
Late this week, Facebook announced that it's begun rolling out a new mobile feature to a small number of users that greatly enhances the service's search capabilities. Anyone who's ever used Facebook's search on mobile or the desktop are probably well-aware that it's not exactly the greatest tool out there - sometimes I even have difficulty getting a result for someone already on my friend's list. But finding people and groups is fairly easy; finding content from your friends' old posts is not.
With this updated search, Facebook is looking to change that - but again, just for mobile. If you've ever been "shared" a post, which basically means you're on someone's friends' list and have had access to it before, that post can show up in this updated search. This of course means one thing: Anyone could easily retrieve old posts, perhaps even those you don't want to be reminded of.
On one hand, it's hard to call this kind of ability a privacy issue, because any post that this search it brings up was willingly posted by its author. But on the other hand, this search could retrieve old posts that the owner may now find embarrassing, or simply unnecessary to bring back up.
This feature becomes yet another that many are going to feel is completely unnecessary by Facebook, and if it becomes a standard one, it's no doubt going to result in many uncomfortable people - and not to mention bumped posts that were made years (which is already a "problem" to some).
