Facebook Comes Out of the Closet

If you thought Craig had a wide stance, consider Facebook's. One of the great features of Facebook was privacy. You could be assured that what was in Facebook remained in Facebook. Whatever happened in your stall, stayed in your stall. However, that illusion might be ending soon.

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.

http://gigaom.com/2007/09/05/facebook-open-to-public-search/