Facebook Revokes The Right Of Users To Hide From Name Search
Facebook users have a reason to worry about a decision concerning privacy. Facebook is discarding a privacy feature that enabled users to hide from the billion-plus members of the social networking site. According to a report from Associated Press, the social networking giant has revealed its plan of doing away with “Who can look me up?” privacy setting. The feature otherwise provides users a way to stop other users from finding them by typing their name in the website’s search bar.
In an announcement made by Facebook on 10th Oct 2013, the company indicated that it wants to tackle the conflict between the said user privacy policy and Graph Search feature – the latter being a newly launched sophisticated search feature, helping the company earn revenue via advertising.
Earlier, using Facebook’s search, people often couldn’t find someone they knew personally or someone in a common Facebook Group. In simple terms, anyone on Facebook can now find your profile through its search bar. It provided them with a false sense of security as people felt that it would prevent strangers from accessing their profile through their names.
Facebook had already initiated a process to eliminate this privacy feature in December 2012, but had limited the elimination to users who had not been using it. Now, nearly 10 months after the original announcement, the company is resolved to stop it once and for all. These, according to Facebook, amount to only single digit percentage of the total of more than 1.2 billion people using the social networking site.
As per another update from Facebook, the company might not actually withdraw the search setting completely. Rather, it intends to send a notification to all the people who are currently using the privacy setting and only when they click on the “Okay, I understand”, button will the setting be revoked. The company further clarified that the notifications might not necessarily be sent out immediately and that the task might be accomplished within the coming weeks.
