The main reason is you may have a number of friends with their privacy set to public. If you comment on their walls, or if they put up a photo of you on their profile, it will be visible to all. So if someone wants to check you out, say an employer, or an ex, they find you but can’t see you’re profile because you’re private. But it’s simply a matter of ‘viewing your friends’ and trawling through everyone with a public profile.

Any interaction you’ve had with that person is on their profile. Beers sent, are you a ‘top friend’, does so and so think you’re sexy, whatever. Most of which is meaningless and can be taken with a grain of salt. But wall messages and photos can lead to awkward situations if seen by the unintended. You have to be in the same ‘network’ but most groups of friends are usually in the same networks anyway i.e. their country.

So even when you’re privacy is set to ‘private’, having ‘view friends’ link visible only makes it easy for strangers or people you barely know to gather at least a minimal amount of information about you. A lot of people wouldn’t be aware of this because when they are at Facebook, they are ‘logged in’ so everything just looks public and accessible (blue names instead of black names).

But if you were brand new to Facebook and saw your own profile (private) but viewed your friends you’d see how a stranger would see it. Some profiles private, others public. Simply by joining the most common ‘network’ would reveal this. Maybe you didn’t realize that so and so had their privacy set so low and those embarrassing snaps from the other night were visible to anyone who cared to look.

Lets be careful out there…