Popular student networking site Facebook implemented a new feature recently that would potentially allow anyone to view member names and profile photos without actually having a Facebook account. Furthermore, these limited public profiles will also begin appearing on popular search engines like Google and Yahoo! as early as next week.
Before the change, one could only view profiles if he or she had an account, and even then the information shown was very limited.
This latest change comes exactly one year after engineers unveiled the highly controversial News Feed feature, which tracks every user’s profile changes and wall posts.
Site engineer Phil Fung said the quantity of information presented in the new search feature shouldn’t be an issue.
“The public search listing contains less information than someone could find right after signing up anyway, so we’re not exposing any new information,” Fung said in a blog post on the site.
Junior computer science major Andy Lindeman said Facebook users shouldn’t complain about the new feature if they already have a profile.
“If you’re on Facebook, you’re putting yourself out there,” Lindeman said. “It’s an easy option to turn off.”
Junior public relations major Owen McGuire agrees.
“The [Web site’s] terms of use says they can do anything they want to with the information you put up there,” McGuire said.
Many users who sign up fail to read the fine print and as a result could have inadvertently agreed to those policies without actually consenting.
In the official terms of use, it states: “by posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant … to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.”
Though the News Feed and public profile listings can be disabled based on the user’s privacy settings, some students are troubled that the information could be available to non-Facebook users.
“As long as it’s just my name and my photo, it doesn’t really bother me,” biomedical engineering major Leigh Booth said. “If they could just search and actually see my [full] profile, I wouldn’t be as comfortable with that.”
Though some students have expressed concerns, the feature seems to be embraced much more easily than the News Feed feature, where one Facebook group entitled “Students Against News Feed” gained more than 750,000 members.
So far, only a handful of groups have banded together to protest the new feature, the largest of which, “Do Not Reveal Any Info to the Public (Official Facebook Petition)”, has more than 300 members.
Jung said users can easily restrict access simply by accessing
the Search Privacy page within the Web site.
“You will only appear in searches outside Facebook when your search settings are set to ‘Everyone,'” he said.