There’s been a lot of virtual hand-waving going on following Facebook’s announcement that they’ll allow search engines to spider member public profiles, but I have to yoink a phrase Charles Knight used on me recently: the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes.

Let’s take a look at the stakeholders in this particular fairy tale:

Search engines: obviously happy. Even the alternative people-search engines Charles interviewed, as this comment from Wink demonstrates:

?This is a great move for Facebook, because their users become more reachable and the community becomes more valuable. And it?s a great move for People Search Engines, because another great source of profiles is available. We just hope that they will let people include more data in the Public Search Listing, such as location, school, work, etc. We also want to be sure that people have complete control over their own information and can choose to maintain their privacy.?

Bloggers? Delighted, judging by the sheer volume of words, including my own, being devoted to the topic.

Users? David Berkowitz has pointed out more than once that Facebook goes to greater lengths than most to give users control over what information can be viewed.

Facebook isn?t exposing entire profiles to search engines. Instead, Facebook creates ?public search listings? based on the profiles. Facebook tells members, ?Your public search listing consists of your name and the thumbnail version of your profile picture. This listing will be shown to people who search for your name when they are not logged in to Facebook.? The listing also includes links for Facebook users to send you messages, view your friends, poke you, or add you to their friend lists. Facebook notes that while search preferences within Facebook are updated automatically, the engines will be slower to act on any changes.

…Facebook members can control who can find their profiles within the site - friends, people in shared networks, or everyone. Only if ?everyone? is selected will Facebook provide members with the option of allowing others to see their public search listings. If that option is checked, members can then allow public listings to be indexed by search engines.

But here’s where I’m really confused, and I’ll be truly grateful if someone can explain it to me. The announcement is that Facebook is opening its public profiles to be spidered by search engines, whereas up until now they were only available to the 39 million people who are already a member of Facebook. It just doesn’t seem like a privacy issue. Okay, so now you can be found by Google in addition to the 39 million people who are on Facebook—and, let’s face it, having to create a Facebook profile is hardly a barrier to entry. It’s not as if profiles were limited to an elite few before this announcement.

If people are concerned about what information is available, they have more to worry about than their public profiles being made available; the totality of the information that can be pulled together into a complete picture of you should raise a lot more flags. This article from Stefanie Olsen at ZDNet paints a scary picture of what online marketing dataminers Rapleaf know about you. I tried it—it said my reputation was 2! I don’t know if that’s good or bad; 2 seems like a pretty low number to me, and then couple that with the fact that my email domain is evidently ‘less legitimate’, and it’s clear that you shouldn’t trust me to house sit.

And finally, Facebook themselves, who don’t seem too worried about their recent developments. On the contrary; the rumor from All Things Digital is that they’re looking to raise more funding at a multi-billion dollar valuation.

What about you? Are you happy, sad, indifferent? Is there a problem here, or is the emperor indeed naked?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 12th, 2007 at 5:18 am and is filed under Facebook, Privacy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.