Its about time it opened up... sites like http://myspace.com and http://friends.ac have been doing this for years... why so long??

The headline is a scare tactic, completely innacurate, and reminiscant of tabloid hyperbole.

Change or risk looking stupid.

As you mention elsewhere in the article, it's dependent on privacy settings - you can adjust these to completely hide your profile from search results even for registered and logged-in users. Hiding is a doddle.

If you want privacy, just don't register for FaceBook, MySpace or anything else like it.

As Patrick says, you can change your privacy settings. Facebook had/has a warning on peoples homepages telling them this is about to happen and that they can change their privacy settings to opt out.

Man, I can't wait for the headlines that will appear when the inevitable hack or privacy breakdown happens : "Facebook exposes all !", "Your face exposed - and all the rest too !".

Of course, I avoid social networks like the plague, so it's not like I have anything to risk.

El Reg... letting yourself slip a bit.... don't go the way of the BBC! :)

I have had a notice on my facebook homepage for a few days warning me about this, and telling me where to change it... they also give a demo of what will show up to links from Google for my profile... it's nothing more than a name with links to poke me etc....

I think I'll change my picture to a cat and change the name to a nick name.

Cat Ballou should go well.

Having said that, I'm currently trying to register with a couple of social networking sites under my roleplay character's name. Just because I'm on there, doesn't mean I am who I say I am.

Not only is the headline wrong, so is the opening paragraph. Which kind of invalidates the whole article, really.

Even at the loosest level of privacy, the only aspects of your profile that will be visible to people who aren't logged in are a small thumbnail of your profile photo (if you have one) and your name. And if people are searching for you by name, then the latter is hardly a state secret, is it?

It's also inaccurate to say that "anyone will be able to view member profiles". Even if someone finds you via the public search, they'll still have to login (registering in the process, if necessary). So the privacy aspect of viewing full profiles has not changed.

Pretty much the only thing about Facebook I liked was the fact my info didn't show up on search engines. It was nice for people from my past to be able to find me if they really went looking. Social networking sites are dumb. I actually spent days this spring deleting accounts from way back. Better off if these things are forgotten.

Oh well. Whatever works for their business if fine with me. The only thing I don't get is what differentiatesFacebook from MySpace now?

Hate to say this folks, but the following tickbox option has been in the "search" section of privacy settings at least since I joined Facebook back in May:

"Allow my public search listing to be indexed by external search engines (ex. Google, Yahoo, MSN)"

So, for at least 4 months it has been an option - I had no idea they *weren't* allowing external search engine indexing until I saw the item saying that they were going to, so I just turned it off as a matter of course *shrug*

Just a case of being aware.....