Facebook is no stranger to accusations that it is too public for most users’ own good. But now Facebook has launched its own search engine, Graph Search, some are warning it is going to be a recipe for divorce. 
Incredibly one if three divorce petitions already contain the word ‘Facebook’. And certainly as a journalist selling and writing real-life stories for newspapers, magazines and TV worldwide, we know ourselves Facebook crops up a lot. The problem is Facebook is so very public. Your conversations, your friends, who you talk to, where you are – it’s very easy for your partner or spouse to see what you’re up to or even who your exes were. And even you take steps to cover your tracks, you can bet a friend will have noticed anyway…
Now the authors of a controversial survey in 2009, Divorce-Online, are predicting a huge rise in Facebook instigated divorces around the world as Facebook makes it easier for bored married people to look for illicit fun and believe it could spell disaster for paid for online dating sites such as Match.com and e-Harmony and of course the more illicit sites that specialise in married affairs.
For 1 US dollar, users can now send a message to a non-friend — that is, to another user not on their friend list. Unveiling the service for U.S. users this week, Facebook said the new fee was intended less as a way of generating revenue — and more as a means of protecting user privacy. However, Divorce-Online claim the company appears to be cherry-picking premium features that have been successful on dating sites.
Mark Keenan, a spokesman for Divorce-Online, says, “We have continued to monitor the divorce petitions we produce and the prevalence of the word Facebook in them has if anything slightly increased. It has become the all pervasive tool for communicating in affairs, replacing e-mail, texting and phoning and the new Graph Search feature is only going to make it much easier for people to use Facebook as a tool to have affairs in my opinion.”
* Divorce-online.Co.uk is the UK’s leading online divorce service, having processed over 100,000 divorce cases since 2000.
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