flickr user smemon

As you’ve probably heard, Facebook is once again in the news for changing their privacy policies, this time removing a feature “Who can look up your timeline by name”. Usually, I’m not too upset by these privacy changes; after all, it’s the user’s responsibility to take control of their privacy, and when you’re posting things on the Internet, you naturally need to assume not everything will be private.

This feature removal goes one step further though, in my opinion.

According to AP (disclaimer: I work for AP) the number of people currently using this feature amounts to a “single-digit percentage of the nearly 1.2 billion people on its network”. Let’s assume 5% of accounts were using this feature. That’s 60 million people. A small percentage, but a huge raw number equivalent to the population of Italy.

With a number like that, there are probably some pretty good reasons users wouldn’t want to be found. So let’s think of this in the lens of some possible user stories.