New Facebook privacy options…is too much, too less?

Alright, here it is! I’ve always been one of those meek observers of the web2.0 scenario, giving in to inertia to write anything myself. But this one was a bummer!

I searched for my name on google yesterday, hoping to see a latest publication and my lab’s website pop-up. But what I found on the first page itself was a couple of facebook friends’ names, because they have me on the list!Clicking on the link of my friend’s name took me to the main page of facebook, where it even showed my pic and some other people’s pics, who happen to be on my friend’s list.Now this was unexpected, because I thought my profile and my facebook contacts are only visible to my friends on facebook. Digging into the gazillion privacy options of facebook, i finally found and option to choose if my profile should be indexed by search engines. What more, the option was activated by default!

Now I agree it would be a good marketing tactic - you search for your friend’s name, the facebook result shows up, and you also see some common friends - well, anyone would be tempted to signup. But all this without explicit knowledge of registered users!Isn’t that unethical?Or am I just over reacting?I f i want my profile to show up on google, i’d rather make it public.

Last week there was a lot of coverage about the new facebook privacy features. I’m not really sure if this feature is new as well, because i didn’t come across any blog which mentioned this. But the thing is, why can’t facebook be more open to the users and make such things more prominent (think linkedin, which has a clear distinction between a public and linkedin profile.).

I found this video explaining the new privacy settings on another blog (http://tinyurl.com/2c9h8v), but the question is, why can’t facebook add such videos to their website?I’d like to know your thoughts about this issue, because I don’t really think its that trivial an issue. And for Mr Z, maybe its time to go back to Harvard and take Ethics 101!