Facebook Opens Doors - Privacy Concern?

We’ll see how this shakes out.

Jesse Stay pointed me (via twitter) to Om Malik’s report of Facebook opening itself to publicly-available people searches.

Tonight, Facebook launches a “public listing search� which allows anyone to search for a specific person. The company says that the information being revealed through these listings is minimal and much less than the information available to someone logged into the Facebook network.

A public search listing provides, at most, the name and profile picture of any Facebook member that has their search privacy settings set to “Everyone.� It will show less information about a person than results of a search performed by someone logged in to Facebook. We wanted to give people who had never come to Facebook, or who are not currently registered, the opportunity to discover their friends who are on Facebook.

In a month from now, these public listings are going to be find their way into search engine indexes. “We are giving users approximately one month to set their privacy options before we allow search engines to index these public search listings,� the company spokeswoman wrote in an email.

What’s important to me is that Facebook users clearly KNOW and UNDERSTAND what may be happening to their personal content.

Facebook has already had some privacy issues:

• Danah Boyd wrote a full essay on Facebook’s Privacy Train wreck a full year ago, pointing fingers at facebook’s system glibly posting information about what people are doing and who they are doing it with or to, especially in “the feed”.
• A search on Google for “Facebook Privacy” reveals a startling number of student essays, reports and articles from college papers about not giving facebook too much of your life.
  • Facebook: Threats to Privacy by Harvey Jones, Jose Hiram Soltren, MIT,  Dec. 2005
  • A Privacy Disaster Waiting To Happen? by Ralph Gross and Alessandro Acquisti, Carnegie Mellon.
• Slashdot points to an article on the Louisiana State University Shreveport website where a state official used the Patriot Act to get behind Facebook’s privacy wall in conducting research on a job-applicant.
• Back in January, Facebook added better privacy tools to the system, allowing people to make stuff visible or non-visible to people.  However, there still is no option for NOBODY BUT ME to see certain things like photos

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Tags: Life, Misc, Networking, Social-Networking