Facebook Privacy Settings = Negative Friending Consequences
Published by Rodney Rumford December 13th, 2007 in Facebook.I wrote a blog post on facebook friending etiquette back in September. Then a few days back I did a blog post that I caught a ton of flack for around the facebook friending issue. The gist of the post was that I thought someone was being dishonest. It turns out they were not.
Michael Roach said we had 16 friends in common in his friend request; yet I could not see any of our mutual friends (facebook normally has a link that shows the common friends that you have). So I decided to pick up the phone and do the right thing and try to get to the bottom of this. Was this a facebook error? Was he being intentionally misleading? Had he changed his privacy settings such that the friend request did not show our common friends on facebook?
It turns out that Michael had in fact changed his privacy settings a few months back so that people could not see his friends. About 5 weeks ago facebook started displaying how many common friends in the friend request area. He was unaware that this caused his friend request to look differently than 99% of the users on facebook (so was I).
One of the true benefits of facebook is the connections and finding friends that you have in common. I recommend that you leave this box checked (this is the default setting) on your privacy page.
Michael Roach is now officially my friend on facebook. It turns out that we have a bit in common and both have engineering backgrounds. 
I would also say that he is quite skilled at what he does and is a stand up guy! The funny thing is; facebook just facilitated a new real world connection.
Friending screenshot after he changed his facebook privacy settings.
Technorati Tags: facebook, facebook friends
The real point was that the guy was spamming you. The reason why he disabled the show common friends was because when he was starting out he probably didn’t want people to see they have no friends in common. This guy is nothing but a spammer, and I would not trust him.
Wowee - I’m tingling all over. I’m always the eternal optimist. I just knew something positive would come out of all this.
I wasn’t fully aware of the implications of that particular privacy setting. See - now you’ve both enlightened us all!!
I’m delighted to hear yet another quality connection has now been made via Facebook. Gotta love it.
Rodney, thanks for calling me to sort this all out. I think that says a lot about your character. You’re honest enough — and man enough — to ask for more information and set the record straight.
And you were very quick to put up this post right after our conversation! I thought I would see something tonight or tomorrow only.
I wish I had known about those settings a while ago! I changed them today, but now I realize that every other friend request I’ve sent out, in which I said that we had friends in common, looked like a lie. D’oh!
Facebook should really consider allowing friend requests to mention that you do indeed have friends in common, but not necessarily which ones if someone chooses to limit privacy settings.
In any case, I appreciate this new post very much, and I look forward to get to know you better.
Thanks,
Michael
I’m really glad that this came to such a positive — and informative — ending. I suspected that privacy settings were the culprit behind all of this.
Rodney, you’re a decent guy for doing the legwork on this issue.
And Michael is right, Facebook should change its friend request notification layout so that information is consistently displayed.
Thinking about this a little further, I don’t think that Pokes, Messages and Friend Requests should share the same privacy settings.
I changed the settings for these many months ago. I would receive pokes and messages from people I didn’t recognize… and when I messaged them to ask if I knew them, I didn’t necessarily want them to see everything in my profile — including friends. So I kept the settings to a bare minimum.
When Facebook added the feature a few weeks back to allow us to see mutual friends on friend requests, I thought it was great. Based on the mutual friends, I could now see when a blank friend request was coming from someone who was simply networking on Facebook, and not someone I met at a specific event.
By then, I had completely forgotten about my changed privacy settings. Besides, I wouldn’t have made the connection if it hadn’t been for Stalinslav’s reply on the other post. That made me look into it.
It’d be nice — but probably complicated — if Facebook would distinguish between the privacy settings these 3 features (pokes, messages and friend requests). I don’t want to hide anything from friend requests, but I don’t necessarily want to open everything up when sending messages to people not in my list of friends.