we all know that one of the main reasons why facebook became so popular is the great privacy settings the site offers. the ability to show and hide certain aspects of your profile to people or networks in a way that you just cannot on other social networking sites really is where facebook shines. but recent moves by the company are a little more than unsettling.

facebook has decided to launch a ‘public listing search’ that allows anyone to search for a specific person and retrieve their name and profile picture. you can prevent your profile from coming up in the public listing by changing your profile settings to something other than ‘everyone’, but this will not be done by default and you will have one month to make the change before facebook allows search engines to index your information.

if you’re concerned about your privacy at all, this is a change you should make immediately. once your information is indexed by the search engines, this move will essentially make facebook the wikipedia of people search. non-facebook users will be able to go to google, type in your name and retrieve your name and profile picture, courtesy of facebook.

of course this move benefits facebook, by increasing their search traffic, since more people will be directed towards facebook (as they look for information on you), but also because these users will probably feel compelled to sign up to either add you as a friend and find out more about you or even just take the site for a spin. this move is also great for data-miners trying to get as much information on you as possible. but for the unwitting users, this will open up their profiles (even if its just a name and a picture) to a much larger audience than they want or expect.

in addition to changing your search privacy settings on facebook, i encourage you to take a look at marc canter’s proposed bill of rights for users of social networking sites.

Technorati Tags: facebook, social networking, privacy, people search

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