A discussion about the software industry and their coders

Facebook is planning to open itself to Search Engines and is giving its users a few weeks to change their Privacy Settings. I logged into Facebook and saw the following message:

Check out your Public Search Listing
Now people can search for this listing from Facebook's Welcome page. In a few weeks, it may also be found through search engines like Google....You can control whether you have a public search listing, and where it appears, from your Search Privacy page.

(See Screen shot attached.) The move is obviously to attract more Traffic in terms of Page Views and new potential users. Which would translate into more Ad Revenue.

On checking the Search Privacy Page I noticed that the default setting is "Everyone" (screen shot below).

I am changing my settings to "Only My Friends" and telling all my friends to quickly change their Search Privacy settings. The reason I liked Facebook was that it was not an open platform. At its simplest the opening of Social Networks like Facebook to Search Engines should raise questions around identity theft.

I agree with what Om Malik says about the personal privacy issues involved here: Think broadly however, this is yet another small step in the overall erosion of personal privacy, thanks to the ever growing popularity of the social networks. I don’t like the direction where all this is headed...We are slowly leaving digital litter all over the web, and some day it is going to cause problems.