my compatriot Denis Balencourt put a presentation on Slideshare how to deal with this problem. The presentation explains how to put (part of) your Facebook connections into a group, and then exclude that group from access to a feature.

See the slides at http://www.slideshare.net/quinze/how-to-manage-friends-on-facebook-presentation

So what the people on your network will have to do is:
- each of them has to create a group, for example: “may_not_see_friendslist”
- put each and everyone of their friends into that group (that is, if they want to prevent all of their connections from seeing the other connections)
- go to the “Friends” item you find under Settings… Privacy Settings… Profile
- Set access to “Friends only”
- on top of that, add the group “may_not_see_friendslist” to the people who are not allowed to see the friends list under “Except these people”

As you can see, Facebook has made it rather difficult to hide your list of connections… we can safely say that it is in their business interest that people can surf around and make new connections…

I have setup a network, and some people on the network, a private one. Some people in the network do not want other members of the network to be able to see their friends. I had recommended that they change their Setting->Privacy Setting->Profile->Friends to friends only, not network and friends. but this doesn’t work. For example, I’ve set everything as Friends Only, but other members of the group can see all my friends.

Any ideas?

Greetz,
Wim

IT security and control firm Sophos is urging Facebook to improve its default privacy settings following new research that revealed members are unwittingly exposing their personal details on a mass scale to millions of strangers, putting themselves at risk of identity theft.

In fact I had bookmarked an earlier report in August and listened to the accompanying podcast (mp3) where the network privacy issue was mentioned, but it never struck me what the implication for us (Europeans/Belgians) was until I started playing with Facebook myself some weeks ago…

I guess there must be a business benefit in opening profiles to network members by default since nothing has changed since…