Facebook Privacy Settings - A Change to the Facebook Search Engine

Last year Facebook announced that they were removing an old setting called “Who can look up your Timeline by name?”.  They started by removing this feature last December for people who were not already using the feature, with the small percentage of people who were still using the setting able to continue using it for the time being. However, these people will now start getting reminders in the next few weeks about the last stage of privacy settings being removed from the Facebook search, meaning that now everyone is searchable on Facebook and you can no longer remain hidden.

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Facebook have announced that they are removing the setting which allows people to hide from the search, a move which means that no one will be able to hide from Facebook’s new feature, Graph Search. This will make their new feature more effective, enabling searches which include the terms “Friends of Friends…” and meaning that anyone who is on Facebook will turn up in the search. This means that there is greater importance given to controlling your individual content on your Timeline, as this is the only way you can make yourself more hidden and private. Each Facebook user should adjust their own privacy settings for each post that they put online in order to make sure that only the people they wish to see it will be able to.

According to Facebook, the ability to hide yourself from the search setting was created when Facebook was a “simple directory of profiles and it was very limited”. By this they mean that it did not stop people from navigating to your Timeline by clicking your name in a story in the News Feed, or from a mutual friend’s timeline. The setting also made Facebook’s search engine feel “broken at times” according to the site. For example, people told Facebook that they found it confusing when they tried looking for someone who they knew personally then couldn’t find in a search result, or when two people were in a group and couldn’t find each other through a search. The removal of this feature and the addition of the Graph Search will counteract this problem, making it easier to find your friends and connect with them online.

However, this does lead to worry surrounding people who don’t want to be found as they will now appear in the Facebook search. This has led people to highlight their privacy concerns to Facebook, but Facebook have advised on their blog that “whether you’ve been using the setting or not, the best way to control what people can find about you Facebook is to choose who can see the individual things you share”. This shows that there is still going to be an emphasis placed upon what content you post on the site in the first place, and that it is now the responsibility of the user to make sure this content is either private or public depending on their preference.

What do you think?

Did you use the privacy setting on the Facebook search engine? Do you think the removal of the privacy setting is a good thing?

Rowena Cormack  

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