Technologically, what's happening is that Google is simply grabbing public information from Facebook, but it looks like some members don't agree on what they want to treat as "public information." So the "default" seems to be in favor of keeping it public and searchable. Or as Google put it when queried recently, "This is public information that Facebook has published using the hCard and XFN microformats that are supported by our Rich Snippets feature."
Google has an agreement with Facebook that allows the search engine to pull this information into its SERPs. It's not just Google, though; other search engines can crawl Facebook's public information. So how do you keep your information private on Facebook?
It isn't easy. The New York Times noted that if you want to protect your privacy on the social networking site, you'll have to navigate through 50 settings with more than 170 options. Why? Well, Facebook says that it wants to give its users fine-grained control of what they share and what they keep private. That's admirable, but in the process the company seems to have lost sight of a different imperative: keeping it simple. How many users are going to jump through that many hoops?
The answer, it seems, is "not many." There are plenty of users who have at least some privacy controls in place. But others are taking a different route. Matt Cutts, along with others in the tech industry, have opted out of Facebook completely, deactivating their accounts. It doesn't seem to be anything one can call a movement, but it does give one pause. There are any number of reasons one may opt out of a social network, but certainly the labyrinth of privacy settings couldn't have helped. And if some of the best and brightest are choosing to leave Facebook - and the privacy maze - maybe it's not really serving its purpose after all.
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