Facebook quietly removes 'test' friend-finding feature

[lexipixel]

Are you a stalker, home burglar, rapist or murder and want more info on your next victim? No problem, FB could help you -- well for a few days anyway 'til they killed a new feature they were "testing".

Facebook quietly removes 'test' friend-finding feature

Since it was discovered yesterday, Facebook has removed a feature that let users find other users near their location, whether they were "friends" or not.

[news.cnet.com...]

[Rosalind]

Twitter has had this feature for ages, in the sense that its advanced search shows users posting within a certain distance from any given location. I'm not sure how this is any different?

[lexipixel]

I'm not sure how this is any different?

Twitter is designed to broadcast short messages.

I find Twitter users most often are marketing something or getting behind a cause, or just using it as a wall for graffiti.

Facebook is designed to catalog every intimate detail of each user's life.

Find 10 people "near you" on Twitter, and I seriously doubt without excessive effort, (and doing several related searches and and cross-referencing to discover info on other websites about that user), that you could get the age, date of birth, schools attended, personal relationship, workplace, family connections, religion, "likes", photos, favorite music, what they had for lunch, etc, etc, etc..

Of the 150 people I follow on Twitter, other than the few local celebrities who like to tweet personal bio info, the majority of those I follow are pushing a very narrow message.

Yeah... same thing -- only very different.

Time Magazine thinks "Find Friends Nearby" was a good thing...

[techland.time.com...]

Personally, I don't trust FB at all, they have no respect for users' privacy -- or users period. The idea of getting all the info they can from "dumb f*cks" is the documented corporate ethos.