Why Doesn't Facebook Show You What A 'Friend of a Friend' Sees On Your Profile?

Privacy on Facebook has been vividly described as a "bathroom door that resists all efforts at locking, swinging open again and again while you’re trying to poop." The privacy settings on the site can be tricky, and the site is often coming up with new ways to grant access to users' information as its users' attention and data are the major products Facebook has to sell. The latest announcement is that Facebook will give media organizations special access to Facebookers' posts.

"Only posts that users have marked 'public' will be available for this stream, though some users may be surprised to learn what they have made public," writes Evelyn Rusli in the WSJ. In fact, Facebook has a pretty great tool -- a feature called "View As" -- that lets you see what you've made public. Using the tool -- which is a dropdown option on the right hand side of your profile page as seen at right -- shows you what your profile looks like to other users or to the public at large. It's a way to figure out the results after all of your clicking and massaging of the myriad Facebook privacy setting options.

The tool is lacking a crucial component for most users though. "To preview how your profile appears to a specific person, like a friend or coworker, type their name into the open field and press enter," says Facebook. But what if the co-worker is not your friend, but is instead a "friend of a friend." As Randi Zuckerberg, the sister of Facebook's CEO discovered to her extreme dismay, "friends of friends" on Facebook sometimes have access to content on our profiles that we wouldn't expect, such as an intimate family photo that Zuckerberg thought only her friends would see.

I've had at least one friend "unfriend" me just so I could tell him what was visible on his profile to someone one degree of separation away from him. He wanted to know what people in the dating pool would see on his profile if they knew his friends. It's also highly relevant for employment purposes if it's possible that a human resources person reviewing your file has a friend in common with you. I asked Facebook's chief privacy officer Erin Egan why there isn't an option to see what Facebook users "one hop away from us" -- as the NSA would say -- can see. The question seemed to surprise them.

“We’re trying to balance options while keeping it simple,” says Egan. "We've never gotten feedback about that before."

Egan says the company might reconsider this if they actually heard from users that it was something they wanted. Privacy has become such an issue for Facebook that they invite users to ask the company's CPO questions directly. So if this is a feature you're interested in, you might want to make yourself heard here.