Facebook status updates to be Google indexed
 

If I had to guess I'd say that 99% of the stuff that people share in a panic about changes to some TOS are no biggie. In this instance, one that someone shared on Facebook today seemed worth passing along.

The gist of it is that, unless you change a setting in order to opt-out, your status updates are going to be Googleable "soon"

Here's an independent bit of coverage on the announcement made back on December 7. Maybe I'm just late to the party but it sure flew completely under my radar.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives..._is_set_to.php


Opting out was fairly simple, although I had to click through the sequence a couple of times as it glitched (as FB often does for me) and either froze or went to a different section.

Go to Settings --> Privacy Settings --> Search --> then UN-CLICK the box that says 'Allow indexing'.

cool - saw this, but a good bump

I don't normally worry about this kind of stuff too much & it usually seems to turn out to be a false alarm but in this instance ... well, I've done a good job of keeping anyone related to work off my FB, which gives me the freedom to bitch about work on FB to what are (ostensibly) my friends. I definitely don't need a client to Google my name for some reason & have my status updates delivered to them.

very good point!!

Yikes. OK, I don't even put anything embarrassing or private in my status, but this unsettles me. I wonder what Facebook gets out of doing this. Seems like it's just going to cause an even larger glut of spam accounts since the spammers will be able to pimp their stuff without having to send out a bunch of phony friend requests.

$$$

They're believed to be getting paid by Google for access to the info, same way Google is paying Twitter for access to theirs. The motivation for Google is to make sure they don't get obsoleted by real-time info coming from Twitter & to reduce the impact of Twitter in the real-time niche by adding the much larger FB user base to the mix.

Thanks for the heads up Jon, I hadn't noticed this one.

Wow thanks, I've unchecked that box.

Mine was already unchecked.

That's pretty shitty. They do this even if you are set to friends only? Fuck that.

Nope, it's apparently (best I can tell) for those who had parts of their profile (such as updates) set to public. Thing is, with their recent revision of privacy settings I don't have much doubt that there's a very large number of users who couldn't even begin to tell you accurately what their settings are.

It kinda forced me into my settings to update the privacy stuff a week or so ago.

I don't remember seeing the indexing option then, but when I just looked, it wasn't checked, so...

Same here, except mine was checked. Dunno why though, since I don't have anything set to "public".

I kind of wonder if "friends of friends" instead of just "friends" seeing updates might be classified as "public" for their indexing purposes & that's why mine was checked instead of unchecked.

Thanks for the update, I did so as well.

It looks like it says it will only index things set to be viewable by "Everyone". Regardless, I still unchecked it.

Didn't know, thanks Jon.

Just did it and got this message:

Important Privacy Announcement
Worried about search engines? Your information is safe.
There have been misleading rumors recently about Facebook indexing all your information on Google. This is not true. Facebook created public search listings in 2007 to enable people to search for your name and see a link to your Facebook profile. They will still only see a basic set of information.

FWIW, mine was checked, so I had to uncheck it.

I feel like I can see a lot more photo albums and profile pics of hot friend of friends than I could in the past.

it's easier to access them now because of the tab that's now showing on about everybody's homepage but the pics used to be accessible to almost everyone before since the access to picture defaults to "everyone" so as soon as someone uploaded a picture and didn't make sure the right privacy was set, you could see their pics. Thing is, you had to find an entryway, like a mention that your friend had been tagged in a pic...

FM

Much ado about nothing here. Didn't have to change a thing in my settings.

Don't really see why people are 'stressing' over this myself - at the end of the day I've nothing either posted or on my profile which I think would interest or excite anyone ....

All I can see this doing in the main is making it harder to google and get useful information, bah humbug ;)

Looks like they're starting their damage control.

Here's a very long & detailed explanation of what the hell is or isn't going on, both good and bad, as well as some of the unknown (which kind of critically includes some confusion about whether a lot of users end up as opt-in or opt-out)
4 Questions & Answers You Should Know About Facebook’s Public Search Listings

It ends with the following summary
* Facebook has been offering public listings well before last week’s announcement.

* These listings have been exposed to search engines before members got a heads-up about it last week.

* Millions of Facebook members have to opt-out of the exposure, if they don’t want it (and may have assumed they were already "private").

* Facebook will be feeding these URLs to the search engines.

* Exposure of the URLs means that even if you opt-out, you might find you get a URL-only listing showing up at Yahoo and maybe Microsoft Live.com and Ask.com.

I think it's always been pretty obvious that it was searchable -- if people are too stupid to realize that, is it facebook's fault?

But how obvious was it? I mean, I've never had a single search for anyone ever randomly return a Facebook entry, not a single time that I can recall. And I search names, from the famous to the entirely mundane, for various reasons pretty regularly.

So with that (admittedly anecdotal) experience, why would I have any reason to expect or even suspect that Facebook status updates or even profiles would be Googleable?

You never google yourself?

I do so every few months and pretty much ever since I joined fb, my profile has been the first result.

Like most (?) people, I've Googled myself in the past but don't recall doing so since I started messing with FB a few months back, so that definitely hasn't happened to me.

And since you brought it up, I just Googled my name (as it's used on FB) ... not a Facebook profile in sight. One Twitter, two LinkedIns, and one MySpace (none of which relate to me) but not a single Facebook on the first page.

I would imagine most people would have it be among the first 10 hits. But, clearly, ymmv.

I guess in addition to it being first for me, I would say most times I searched a name (something I do often when looking for technical papers) a fb profile made the first page of results - even if it was not necesarily the same person I was looking for.

Googling my name didn't turn up anything related to me through the first few pages on Google. I did find out that some guy with my name wrote the book "Documenting Gay Men: Identity and Performance in Reality Television and Documentary Film". Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Apparently there is a Facebook profile for "Greg Stelmack", but it ain't me.

HOW COULD I BE SO STUPID

Much ado about nothing, IMO. If you already had private settings you have nothing to fear. If you already only allow friends to see your updates you are fine. This only affects those that had their profile completely public, and if that's the case I don't blame Facebook for allowing places to index those areas.

That's weird, whenever I searched someone in the news I always ended up seeing Facebook links.

I see facebook pages for name searches pretty regularly myself, in the past.

I also regularly get facebook results. I agree with DanGarion -- much ado. You made a profile on an internet site. You made that profile public. OMG! People can search and find that profile?!! NO WAY!!

The reason you can't find your profile with google is probably that you have your privacy settings up to a level that it is hidden.

In my case, I'm not concerned at all about people finding my profile. I don't put anything on the internet that I wouldn't say in front of my mother, my boss, or my wife. So I'm not trying to hide anything. I'm just sick and tired of getting Facebook friend requests from spammers, and if they know their profile will be found in search engines, that's just going to encourage them.

Long term, this might just be a bigger pain in my ass, and as long as my wife pays Lady Ursula to bring that cattle prod to my house every Thursday, I've got a big enough pain in my ass as it is.

Actually I haven't seen the middle ground ("friends of friends") addressed one way or the other so far, specifically whether those setting defaulted to being indexed or not being indexed. Got some linkage with definitive clarity on that?

edit to add:

Me either. Unfortunately those aren't the only possible categories.

Not sure, I would assume that anything that had some type of privacy noted would not be indexed. Basically if you can't see it when you aren't logged in it's probably not being indexed, since I doubt Google has a special index anything we want without being logged in key. Typically the only things that can be indexed are those things that are accessible to those that are not logged in.

This is a somewhat old bump, but here is a web tool that people can use to verify that their privacy settings on facebook aren't letting a ton of personal information out to other third party applications and the like:

ReclaimPrivacy.org | Facebook Privacy Scanner