June 8, 2010 – Private email addresses of individuals who have Facebook accounts are getting indexed by the search engines. Issues can arise when machines are indexing.
BillHartzer.com raises the question of privacy and access in his blog post, “Facebook Privacy Gone Awry: Search Engines Indexing Email Addresses from Facebook”. There are currently approximately 5,000 email addresses having been indexed from Facebook by Google, Yahoo, etc. Considering there are far more Facebook users than 5,000, this method being used must be cases of malfunctions or programs going awry. One of the best things you can do to combat these issues is to utilize a social media monitoring tool to track mentions of you, your company, and/or your brand online. You will be notified if your brand, your company name, your domain name, or even your email address shows up.
Facebook has been plaugued by all sorts of privacy issues. Time will tell how they handle this one.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.
