As of September 5 2007, Facebook started offering data about you publicly to non-friends and non-facebook users with what as known as your Public Search Listing. Because facebook is such a popular site, if you have a unique name, often your public search listing will be one of the first sites that come up if your name is googled.

This URL of your public search listing is currently http://www.facebook.com/people/Your-Name/YourFacebookID.

Supposedly, facebook allows you to control whether this page exists with the preference on your privacy page, Settings > Privacy > “Create a public search listing for me and submit it for search engine indexing.” If you uncheck this checkbox, and log out of facebook, your page will return a “Page not Found” error page with your image, friends, and fan pages removed.

However, this page will still remain as one of the top results for your name.

Why? Web browsers, search engines and web servers use header codes to determine the status of a page. Headers codes include 200 OK, 301 redirect, 302 found, and 404 not found. If facebook were to honestly remove your page, they would return a 404 not found header when you go to your public search listing URL. But this is not what is occurring:

Try running curl -I http://www.facebook.com/people/Your-Public-Facebook-URL, a command that returns the headers of a document. Even months after you have turned off your public search listing, this is the result:

HTTP/1.1 302 Found

In my opinion this is dishonest of facebook. Google sees this “page not found” error page but doesn’t detect it as an error because the header is falsely returning 302, so it has no reason to remove the page from your search results. This combined with facebook’s policy of requiring you to use your full name, its SEO tactics of having your full name in the URL and also having it appear in the source code (via javascript) 85 times, means this link is never going to go away unless Facebook actually changes their public search listing policy. Because Facebook is such a large site, even if no one links to this page besides Facebook, it still will be a top result in google.

This is just an inconvenience for me, having anyone know that I am on facebook, but it is a real privacy issue for people who would like to reconnect with old friends but need to hide from abusive spouses, exes, stalkers or the like.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 at 2:12 am and is filed under privacy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.