Facebook To Get More Traffic from Search Engines and Messes Up Our Privacy

Yesterday there was an interesting announcement from the team over at Facebook about a new option allowing users to make certain portions of their Facebook profiles available to everyone. Until now the privacy options for various types of information you populate your Facebook profile with included Only Friends, Friends of Friends, and My Networks and Friends.

But from now on there’s an extra option - Everyone. This option means that every user can now choose certain portions of content and make it available for everyone to see. To me it looks like Facebook is absolutely willing to encourage online exhibitionism from people who are willing to show everything they can to other people - for whatever reasons they might want to do so. All the current privacy settings Facebook users have at the moment will remain and users will have to change them manually should they want to open certain portions of their profiles.

Some bloggers have already begun to ask questions about when Facebook will finally make all status updates publicly available to leave no chance for Twitter to survive as it will be nothing but one feature of Facebook once the status updates are public. Of course in this world where everyone is willing to share everything online people must be happy about Facebook rapidly moving to more openness but unfortunately I think internet users already share too much and Facebook has always had an image of a safe harbor where we can post everything and it will only be visible to my friends if I choose to have it this way.

But it seems to me that there is something wrong with this announcement as by giving users privacy controls to make everything visible to everyone Facebook actually complicates things a lot for other users who are not that open and have no desire to be. The problem here is that Facebook is about interaction and people constantly comment on statuses and write on walls of their friends. So if I make a post on a friend’s wall and this friend opts to show his wall to everyone, my post will be visible to everyone as well - even though this is not what I wanted to have and my post was actually intended for the eyes of this friend and his friends as well, not for the entire world to see.

Of course it is totally understandable that Facebook has probably decided that the huge volumes of content they accumulate can help them increase traffic arriving from search engines: my guess is that the content that is available for everyone will be open for search engines to index as well so this will certainly bring more visitors to various Facebook pages from search engines and more pageviews for ads, obviously.

And while I do realize this must be a reasonable business decision for Facebook, I do have my doubts about how exactly I determine if my Facebook activity on profiles belonging to my friends should be visible to everyone if this is what my friends want for their profiles.