Uh-Oh. Google To Index Facebook Comments As Search Results

As a social good, I think privacy is greatly overrated because privacy basically means concealment. People conceal things in order to fool other people about them. They want to appear healthier than they are, smarter, more honest and so forth.
~Richard Posner

First off, regarding the above quote, I chose this one for today's post because it made me laugh. Richard Posner does not seem to know anything about life online. The problem is not the ability to conceal, it is the problem of sharing too much! (I also question his understanding of privacy. What the heck?! Privacy means to fool people?)

Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13739_3-9854409-46.html


I was not sure who Richard Posner is, so I googled him. Richard Posner was born in 1939, and is currently a Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago. He was a Judge on the US Court of Appeals. He believes we are in a depression, not a recession. He can be reached via email at rposner@uchicago.edu. You can view his resume/CV, see books and articles he has written, and learn about some of his activities here. Way to conceal things Judge Posner!

Google, it seems, now plans to index Facebook comments as search results. I can already hear the paranoid outcry against Facebook for this. I'm not sure if this is necessarily the fault of Facebook - could they stop Google from doing this anyway? There are already links to Facebook that show up in Google search results. Do a vanity search (search your own name) and if you are on Facebook you will show up in the results - unless you selected NOT to appear in search results in your settings.

Before you run screaming off to delete your FB account: unless you have set your account as "public" your comments will not be indexed. Unless you comment on the posts of someone who does have a public profile. But other than that your comments will be safe from the prying eyes of someone who is searching on Google. The advertisers FB shares your info with... well, that's another story.

Whenever there is a privacy issue on Facebook (and those come up frequently) multitudes of people get upset. The FB conversation immediately goes in to full "I hate Facebook! I wish there was an alternative!" mode. In the long run, this may well benefit Google+.  Yet I find it hard to believe that Google will index Facebook comments and not index Google+ comments...

Note: I have both Facebook and Google+ accounts. I keep both accounts as private as is allowed.