It's hard to find an AU student without a Facebook account, and soon anyone using search engines will be able to find out if he or she does.
Facebook users were notified in Facebook's News Feed Sept. 5 that through the social network home page anyone can search for users' profiles and see their name and profile picture, unless the certain user sets privacy settings.
Users can limit who searches for their profiles by using Facebook's privacy settings, including limiting searches to people within their network or only those who are their friends on the Web site. These privacy settings are not new to Facebook, and each user can set his or her own privacy settings. Privacy settings can be changed by clicking on "privacy" in the banner links.
"We're expanding search so that people can see which of their friends are on Facebook more easily," Phillip Fung wrote on Facebook's blog. "We think this will help more people connect and find value from Facebook without exposing any actual profile information or data."
"As always, if you do not want your public search listing to be visible to people searching from outside of Facebook, you can control that from the Search Privacy page. Please note that you will only appear in searches outside Facebook when your search settings are set to 'Everyone,'" Fung wrote.
One AU student said he had picked Facebook over other social networking sites because it seemed more private.
"I chose Facebook over MySpace because it had better privacy policies, and I trust Facebook to uphold them," said Andrew Carson, a freshman in the Kogod School of Business.
The information students provide on Facebook has come back to haunt them on occasion. Students at DePauw University were prosecuted in October 2006 for vandalism, when evidence was found on the site by university officials, The Eagle previously reported.
Facebook began in 2004 with networks at only a few universities. It expanded to 800 university networks by May 2005 and added high school networks in September of that year, according to the Web site's time line.
Potential employers also look to Facebook when hiring candidates, The Eagle previously reported. One in four employers in a Careerbuilder.com survey said they use search engines to look for job candidates, and one in 10 said they use social networking sites like Facebook.
In September 2006, the site expanded registration to anyone who wanted to join. It had 20 million users by April of this year. It has continued an average weekly growth of 3 percent since January 2007, according to the Facebook press blog. It now has more than 41 million active members, including 15,030 in the AU network, according to the Facebook press blog.
