Author: May 17, 2021 Years ago, I was at a workshop on society and technology hosted by Microsoft Research in New York City. It was a wonderful group of scholars and civil society leaders working on digital privacy, accountability and transparency. One evening during the event, a representative from Facebook gave a short introduction to a new feature the platform was about to launch. Graph Search, he explained, was based on an algorithm powering a semantic search engine that would allow Facebook users to dive deep into the “social graphs” of their network of friends, enabling them to search for people using detailed attributes collected from their activity on the platform.