From Gigaom:

One of the great features of Facebook was privacy. You could be assured that what was in Facebook remained in Facebook. However, that illusion might be ending soon.

Tonight, Facebook launches a “public listing search” which allows anyone to search for a specific person. The company says that the information being revealed through these listings is minimal and much less than the information available to someone logged into the Facebook network.

A public search listing provides, at most, the name and profile picture of any Facebook member that has their search privacy settings set to “Everyone.” It will show less information about a person than results of a search performed by someone logged in to Facebook.

This move transforms Facebook from being a social network to being quasi-White Pages of the Web.

I thought 'Squash' makes a valid point:

You can choose as to whether you have a public search page or not as well as what you show on it. So it appears to have these bases followed, although I’m sure many, many people are going to complain that you should be made to turn on these features rather than giving you the option of turning them off.

I can understand the reasoning behind having the features turned on as a default. But as a user, that would make me angry.

What about you Facebookers? What are your thoughts, opinions?

Well I'm setting my Facebook account to private, removing as much info as I can and then abandoning it for the most part.

Really? Because they've taken this step? Or were you generally done with it anyway?

Mostly because they have taken this step (I don't use it much anyway).

It's bad enough when phone companies and others sell your details on to marketing companies, and you get endless calls at home at all hours, now they are going to invade your personal conversations. Just because they are on the net doesn't make them any less personal or private. Imagine you are having a personal face to face real world chat with someone and a third person pops up and interrupts it to offer you insurance.

It's just more spam isn't it?

AND I don't like the idea of the dead hand of government possibly infringing my privacy, something I usually need to protect (in all cases), and I'm not interested in some minor civil servant poking around. Trust me I know what these faceless little nobodies do in their spare moments just because they are bored.

======

Now here's a funny thing:

I was just about to reset my facebook account, as outlined above: I logged on and  found a message from an old friend whom I haven't spoken to for years who was looking for a mutual friend.

There's irony for ya!