"Now you will be able to search for status updates, photo captions, check-ins and comments to find things shared with you."
The key phrase remains "things shared with you." The Facebook announcement adds, "As with other things in Graph Search, you can only see content that has been shared with you, including posts shared publicly by people you are not friends with."
What this does is unlock the past. Until now, Graph Search allowed you to find friends based on semantic queries, easily locating their likes and dislikes and relationships. But finding specific posts or comments might involve clicking through a lengthy timeline.
The new facility, currently available only to some US English speakers, changes this, making posts and comments made years ago easily findable. It is, says Josh Constine in TechCrunch,"the end of privacy by obscurity." Your past, he says, can be searched by anyone with permission to see it – and if that includes friends of friends, it may be more than you realize. "Your bitter posts from your college library, silly comments on friends’ wedding photos, and dispatches from distant vacation check-ins can all be distilled from the rest of your content," he explains.
So while there is much of value in the new facility, especially for advertisers and brand managers who can more easily locate recommendations and criticisms in both status updates and comments, there are distinct dangers for users who may have forgotten about the embarrassing comments or admissions made years ago.
Now is probably the time, before Graph Search and its new capabilities roll out to a wider audience, for Facebook users to revisit their privacy settings. Perhaps getting untagged from old embarrassing party photos, or the location check-ins when visiting a seedy bar as a student, via the Activity Log.
One of the most important options, however, is to limit sharing from 'friends of friends' – which could spread the search results far beyond the user's immediate perception – to just friends.
The real privacy danger is that Facebook's privacy settings are so difficult to navigate for the average Facebook user that this will be ignored. The privacy danger then is that long-forgotten indiscretions could easily resurface. First stop should be the Privacy Shortcuts button (icon with a padlock and three bars) at the top of the page.