Facebook Fixes Search Glitch, Explains Privacy Strategy: "Following yesterday's post about a flaw in Facebook's privacy settings that would let people using Facebook's advanced search options find personal details about persons who had set their profiles to friends only, Facebook quickly fixed their search tool to eliminate that possibility and today its chief privacy officer Chris Kelly spoke with THREAT LEVEL about Facebook's approach to privacy.

'The glitch'was'buried pretty deep in the site's search architecture and one'had to look deep to find them,' Kelly'said.''When there are problems we do try to address them quickly, and we were able to rapidly fix [this].'

Kelly also clarified that the 'search engine indexing' option on the privacy page's search settings only lets search engines know that a person has a profile and some optional aggregate stats such as the number of friends or posts. (Yesterday's post and accompanying news story suggested much more was visible to search engines. THREAT LEVEL regrets the error.)

'There will not be a setting on Facebook that says this profile is available to everyone on Facebook and the internet,' Kelly said. 'No profile information is available to search engines.'

Kelly,'who became the social networking site's privacy officer in September 2005 after a stint as the original general counsel,'hopes instead to mimic the social protections in real world interactions, where it might be possible to find out through normal social channels what neighborhood a person lives in, but not learn their exact address, for instance.

Kelly contends that 100 percent of Facebook users avail themselves of the site's privacy features since users are visible only to members of groups that they join or to their friends. Some 20 percent tweak these setting using Facebook's fine-grained privacy settings page, according to Kelly.

'To me that shows that despite what some people say who want to assert that privacy is going away, we think users care a lot about privacy and control and we aim to give them a lot of privacy and control,' Kelly said.

In related news, BoingBoing's Xeni Jardin'spreads the news of how trying to be more private on Facebook can boomerang.

(Read Original Article - Via Threat Level.)