Facebook to Allow Search Engine Access to User Profiles
Facebook began informing members yesterday that it will begin allowing search engines to crawl the website and thus permit nonuser access to Facebook profiles. According to the company blog:
In a few weeks, we will allow these Public Search listings (depending on users’ individual privacy settings) to be found by search engines like Google, MSN Live, Yahoo, etc. We think this will help more people connect and find value from Facebook without exposing any actual profile information or data.
However, as technology blogger Om Malik points out:
This move transforms Facebook from being a social network to being quasi-White Pages of the Web. Every time a non-Facebook user finds someone on Facebook after a “search,” they might feel compelled to sign-up and get more information. It is a virtuous cycle, meant to attract more people to the Facebook network.
This development is going to strike fear in the hearts of entrepreneurs behind people-search startups that have mushroomed in recent months and have raised many millions in venture backing. It is also be a worrisome development for reputation-based systems such as Rapleaf that are creating profiles of people on the web. With the growing database of names, it is only a matter of time before Facebook rolls out a reputation system, and pegs it to an e-commerce engine.
Clearly, this move goes against previous company policy. Facebook had always asserted that it was more private than other social networking sites. Traditionally, its target audience has been 18-34 year olds who, in the quest for popularity and social connections have not always considered long-term implications of posting personal information on the Internet. The highly publicized case of Amy Polumbo, Miss New Jersey, 2007 is perhaps the most well known example of this, but even for those seeking employment and career advancement, it is a deep concern:
According to some executive search firms, “dossiers” of the dirt – what it terms “moments of misjudgments” catalogued online – are being collected at an increasing rate, and are becoming an area of concern for both job seekers and recruiters.
Stories of people losing out on jobs or getting turfed for an inappropriate blog discussion board comment or frosh photo are no longer rare. And the more one has online contacts or “friends” via ever more popular social networking sites, the more one is at risk of accumulating the dirt.
This begs the question, can we – and indeed should we – entrust our personal information to any company which states, in their privacy policy:
Facebook may use information in your profile without identifying you as an individual to third parties. We do this for purposes such as aggregating how many people in a network like a band or movie and personalizing advertisements and promotions so that we can provide you Facebook. We believe this benefits you. You can know more about the world around you and, where there are advertisements, they’re more likely to be interesting to you. For example, if you put a favorite movie in your profile, we might serve you an advertisement highlighting a screening of a similar one in your town. But we don’t tell the movie company who you are.
We may use information about you that we collect from other sources, including but not limited to newspapers and Internet sources such as blogs, instant messaging services, Facebook Platform developers and other users of Facebook, to supplement your profile. Where such information is used, we generally allow you to specify in your privacy settings that you do not want this to be done or to take other actions that limit the connection of this information to your profile (e.g., removing photo tag links).
And this was before the recent policy change.
Chris Stevens of Telegraph.co.uk discusses measures members can take to avoid being harmed by information posted on Facebook.
Your boss will join Facebook because she can see it on her employee’s screens for 80 per cent of the working day. Now she wants to befriend you. The problem is, your Facebook page is laden with photos of that fancy-dress party to which you wore stockings and suspenders (and you’re a man), smiling drunkenly with a traffic cone for a hat. Your boss will be offended if you don’t accept her friend request, but if you do you’re forced to lay bare everything you and your friends get up to outside work.
Since people do get fired because of their Facebook profile, the best way to deal with this is to leave your boss in friend-limbo, neither accepting nor refusing their friendship. If you absolutely must friend them, tick the box that means they can see only your limited profile. This can be edited retrospectively via the privacy page – the limited profile settings are at the bottom right-hand side of the page – allowing your “limited profile” friends restricted access to your photo albums and public “wall” (the message board all users have on their profile page).
As social networking continues to proliferate, we must be mindful always of present and future implications of sharing data. The Facebook privacy policy change underscores this.