Unpredictable. Unfocused. Just like life.

Facebook is opening itself up to search engines:

"Starting today, we are making limited public search listings available to people who are not logged in to Facebook," said Facebook engineer Philip Fung in a blog post on Wednesday. "We're expanding search so that people can see which of their friends are on Facebook more easily. The public search listing contains less information than someone could find right after signing up anyway, so we're not exposing any new information, and you have complete control over your public search listing."

Doc Searls doesn't think that this is a good thing at all:

Translation: If you’re a FaceBook member, your ass is now online.

[...]

But this is a significant shift. The walled garden called Facebook is declaring itself a public space where suddenly all its members have name badges visible by default to the world.

David Weinberger thinks that the process should be "opt-in":

FB could make this right with about two lines of code: Make exposing your FB info to search engines a matter of checking a box. What part of "opt in" does FB not understand?

Seriously though, you're on Facebook, so your information is already publicly available to any Facebook member. As a member I can search for a person, and see everyone with that name or a similar one, as well as all of their friends. I can't see their profile though, and neither will search engines.danah boyd suggests that profiles will be public but I don't believe that to be the case. That would be a completely different situation.

I understand that your personal information is quite a bit different from you web page, but if everything was opt-in by default then the internet wouldn't be a very useful place as search engines wouldn't be able to find and index anything.

If you are joining a social network like Facebook - heck if you are doing anything on the internet - then you are exposing public information, unless your agreement specifically states it. Does anybody read the Facebook privacy policy? While it states that you control what personal information people see, it says nothing about your name, and you already know that any user can search for you. Facebook is quite clear:

Unlike most sites on the Web, Facebook limits access to site information by third party search engine "crawlers" (e.g. Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask). Facebook takes action to block access by these engines to personal information beyond your name, profile picture, and limited aggregated data about your profile (e.g. number of wall postings).

So if you want to be anonymous, stay off Facebook. Stay off the internet. That isn't even enough. Keep your name out of the newspapers. Even birth announcements make it to the internet.And read the privacy policy.