Facebook Exposing User Profiles

I've been reading recently that Facebook is intending to open up its profile lists to the public - and in particular, public search engines.

Of course, you already know about this because Facebook contacted you, explaining what they were doing, what the impact might be on your personal information, and how you could disable this if you wanted to.

What do you mean - you haven't heard anything?

Funnily enough, neither have I. I happen to know about it because I'm a geek who cares about privacy (nothing's on Facebook which isn't public domain anyway) but I doubt that my sister does. Or anyone else who's not a geek for that matter.

Having been bullied by various friends to join the site, I've actually found it pretty compelling (read: addictive) to use. My main irk, however, was that all the privacy settings were turned off by default.

There is of course a good reason for this - the site's success is based upon the fact that people can search for and find their friends. Maxing out your privacy settings would of course prevent this, and as we all know, people tend not to change the default settings (especially with the very fine-grained control that Facebook actually does give you).

I therefore wish Facebook were a little more communicative about what they were doing with their users. I'd like to see a clear message sent explaining the changes they are making to the display of potentially sensitive information.
I think it's unreasonable to expect users to regularly go to their privacy pages of their own accord to check their settings.

Other system announcements - new features and so forth - appear at the top of a news feed in a different colour. There's no reason this couldn't happen for privacy changes too.

To ensure that there is some public service element to what otherwise would be a ranting blog post, here's how to turn it off.

Log into Facebook, and go to your privacy page. About halfway down you should see the following:

Note how your public search listing is, by default, shown to external search engines. Uncheck that, press Save, and you're done.

And finally - never give personal information to web sites that you do not trust.