Friendship Pages come to Facebook; more privacy concerns follow [Updated]

Updated at the foot of the post

If you’ve ever wanted to see what your friends are doing together, or what you’ve done with them, now you have your chance. Facebook is introducing a feature known as Friendship Pages that will act somewhat like a virtual scrapbook that documents the interactions you’ve had with your friends.

Though there’s no link in the Facebook Blog post to where you can view the pages, we’re agreeing with All Facebook in the idea that they’ll probably roll out to the majority of users in the coming days. According to Facebook, here’s the content for the new Friendship Pages:

They contain the public Wall posts and comments between two friends, photos in which both are tagged, Events they RSVP’d for together and more. You’ll be able to see a friendship page if you are friends with one of the people and have permission to view both people’s profiles.

There’s an interesting privacy twist in here, though. In order to view the Friendship Page between two people, you only need to be friends with one of them. The non-friend party needs to have their profile page publicly visible, but you’ll be able to lurk to your heart’s content.

There are a couple of unanswered questions here. From how it’s described, the third party would be able to see all interaction between the two other parties. However, if I have my wall posts (for example) marked as private, would they still show on the Friendship Page?  To us, this feels like a misstep on Facebook’s part. Unless you’ll need to opt-in to being visible in Friendship Pages, it’s a pretty strange ordeal.

We’ve reached out to Facebook for comment on this, and we’ll let you know when we hear back. In the mean time, the idea is still pretty slick, if a bit concerning. Let us know what you think in the comments.

Update: We have a response from Facebook, however it still doesn’t answer all of the questions, nor the questions that I posed in the email.

My email to them –

Noticed in the Friendship Pages that you only have to be friends with one person involved to view the interactions. That opens a pretty nasty door to lurkers. Any chance that you’ll have to opt-in to have your interactions viewable on the Friendship Pages?

Thanks

And the response, from Facebook –

Hey Brad,

Friendship pages aggregate information into a single place but do not not surface any new information.  Anything you can see through the friendship page is content you could previously see.

Thanks,
Meredith

With any luck, someone from Facebook will let us know the answer to the opt-in or opt-out question soon.