Facebook has been involved in meetings this week talking to employees about their concerns over user privacy. The issue is that people searching the web can now see Facebook members' profiles, unless they have protected them, whether the person doing the search is a Facebook member or not.
Previously the only people who could see these profiles were Facebook members. A fun fact is that the privacy policy as amended to let Web surfers see it is now longer than the US Constitution.
Facebook is coming under pressure from civil liberties groups as well as users to tear the policy up and start again, and particularly to make it easier for people to handle the complex privacy settings on the Facebook pages.
Here's the thing: if you don't want people to know something it has always been a bad idea to put it online. The real difficulty, and not something that's received as much coverage, is that people have been losing control over their own identities and images on social networks. A Facebook profile might be a fine thing for executive A, until he or she finds that someone took a picture of them drunk at a party a few years ago and has tagged it with their name so it shows up on their profile. The fact that they have been teetotal for 12 months doesn't affect the picture's presence, and if whoever uploaded it hardly ever logs on then it's unlikely to be moved anytime soon.
This is happening and it's losing people job opportunities - to me this is much more sinister than people being able to find stuff I've put on the Internet voluntarily. After all, if anyone could find information previously simply by joining Facebook - to which there is no barrier - letting them find it on the open Internet is hardly a major change.
