Today, google launches social search, a service that returns contextual information from friends in your search results. They can do this because they already know everything about you through your google profile and they can use the social graph API to map those connections.

A quick search for Kobe, Japan on my social search uncovered this photo:

Charming, isn’t it. Particularly when taken out of context. According to flickr, almost 400,000 people have seen that photo.

The thing is, you have no control over what other people link to, title, and share. With the increasing ease of uncovering these links it’s so important to make sure your side of the house is in order.

So, a reminder:

1. Kill any links to things you don’t want discovered. From your side, but also from the source if you’re able to. If your friend has a photo or story of you don’t want public, ask them to make it private, or to remove your name.
2. Use privacy filters to control what people can and can’t see. Here’s an awesome one for facebook.
3. Map connections to things you do want public in something google indexes quickly (like their profiles) to push those results above others.
4. Understand how services like social search work so you can be mindful of what’s going to happen when you’re creating content or linking to stuff.

This isn’t about being paranoid, or changing what you share with friends, or the services you use. It’s about understanding how the web hangs together, and that everything you put on it will be there for pretty much forever. With the increasing ease of mapping connections between content you or your friends create, it’s important to make sure that this won’t come back and haunt you.

Posted in Tech on Tuesday October 27, 2009.

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