Facebook sought to reassure its users today as it announced that their Facebook pictures and user names would soon begin showing up in online search results. By explaining its move to open its site to search engines well in advance, Facebook was attempting to avoid a hubbub like the one that erupted last year after it began displaying profile updates, relationship changes and other personal information in a centralised "news feed" on users’ profile pages.

That move sparked an uproar as users inveighed against what they considered to be an excessively intrusive new feature. Facebook’s explanation - that the information displayed in the news feed was no different than what users could already see by digging through friends’ profiles - fell on deaf ears, and Facebook was forced to backtrack.

Facebook was right, of course - its news feed wasn’t displaying any information that was not already publicly available to users of the site. However, the move created a feeling of lost privacy by removing an important layer of obscurity between Facebook users and their friends.

Google’s move earlier this year to publish detailed street-level images of addresses on its Google Maps service prompted similar concerns. Fans of the service said concerns about privacy were overblown, since Google was taking photographs from public streets. But it wasn’t so much the photographs themselves that concerned some users, it was the aggregation of so many street-level photographs in such an easily searchable form. Put another way, it was the loss of obscurity, not the invasion of privacy, that prompted the most concern. 

Most Facebook and MySpace users are happy to give friends, casual acquaintences, and sometimes even complete strangers access to profiles where they list personal information such as phone numbers, email addresses, or the status of their relationships. The sites themselves encourage this, since it drives traffic and results in more connections between users.

If social networks and search engines wanted to take stronger action to address users’ privacy concerns, they could  require users to opt in to having their profile information shared more widely. But that will not happen unless users demand it, and so long as the ienternet’s emphasis on openness remains, that is unlikely to happen. In the meantime, the onus will fall on users to educate themselves about the risks of disclosing too much personal information. Facebook and other sites provide an array of tools for users to take privacy into their own hands. They might do well to use them, rather than relying on the illusion of security through obscurity.