<story><title>Facebook privacy issue: Google search reveals email addresses in Facebook</title><url>http://corywatilo.com/a-real-facebook-privacy-issue-email-addresses</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>blakeross</author><text>Hey all,&lt;p&gt;I work at Facebook, but this is not an official media statement.&lt;p&gt;This doesn&apos;t appear to be a Facebook bug that leaks anyone&apos;s private email address. It appears that all the examples indexed in Google exist in Google because they were already published publicly on other Internet sites. We&apos;re committing a fix right now to stop indexing this page in Google, but even that wouldn&apos;t prevent email addresses from being published because it appears that users are already republishing their addresses in other non-Facebook venues.&lt;p&gt;For example, if you see &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.facebook.com/o.php?k=afc4a7&amp;#38;u=1018862530&amp;#38;mid=21f667bG3cba9bc2G0G8&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.facebook.com/o.php?k=afc4a7&amp;#38;u=1018862530&amp;#38;...&lt;/a&gt; in isolation, it appears to be divulging private information.&lt;p&gt;However, the original Facebook email that links to that page and contains the user&apos;s email address was republished publicly on a mailing list archive by the owner of the email address: &lt;a href=&quot;http://games.dir.groups.yahoo.com/group/Living_Greyhawk/message/98175&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://games.dir.groups.yahoo.com/group/Living_Greyhawk/mess...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Does anyone see an example where this is not the case that constitutes a privacy leak?&lt;p&gt;Blake Ross</text></comment>
<story><title>Facebook privacy issue: Google search reveals email addresses in Facebook</title><url>http://corywatilo.com/a-real-facebook-privacy-issue-email-addresses</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>a4agarwal</author><text>Google is indexing Facebook&apos;s &quot;Opt out of emails from Facebook&quot; page for email addresses that were submitted using the &quot;Find a friend&quot; feature.&lt;p&gt;I checked out the Google site and saw a few addresses in the format name.secret@blogger.com, which indicates these are the SECRET email addresses people use to post to their blogger sites. Pretty bad.</text></comment>