Privacy and the Bing Integration with Facebook

We made a big announcement
yesterday announcing the integration of Facebook with Bing searches.  A large integration like this naturally raises
some privacy questions, which are addressed by Paul Yiu and Todd Schwartz on
the Bing team in a
blog post on the Bing Community Blog:

One of the top things that privacy experts emphasized, and customers told us
about all the Facebook features, was that privacy and control were very
important to enabling Facebook information within Bing. So, we took that
feedback very seriously and put user privacy at the core to all these features
in Bing.  Bing’s “Liked Results”, for example, will surface content that is
designated as “public” and linked to a person’s Facebook friends. This is the
same information someone could access by viewing their Facebook network
directly, except it adds relevancy by being presented alongside “traditional”
Bing search results.

Our goal is to deliver the most recently shared links and information in a
way that demonstrates our commitment to user privacy. While the social search
feature only uses information from an individual’s Facebook network, we take
additional steps to provide customers with greater control over their
information and to help safeguard people’s privacy. Some key functions we’ve
built include:

· You will be notified that we will be enhancing your Bing experience before
we actually do it, with an opportunity to say “disable” or to go and learn more
before you decide if you want to take advantage of the feature.

· People will only see Facebook Profile Search results for people in their
Facebook network when signed into Facebook. Users will only see “like”
information from their Facebook friends. In both cases, only information that is
intended to be shared broadly across the internet is shared.

· Facebook requires users to be 13 or older to access its services, and
Bing’s Facebook Profile Search feature will only surface results for users who
are 18 or older based upon their Facebook profile.

While the benefits of a more personalized search experience are enabled by
default if you are signed into Facebook, there is a control feature that sits at
the top of the Bing Page and a notification with first five searches in Bing
that enables customers to learn more about the feature or turn it off the
feature within Bing with a few simple clicks.

A final question we heard is whether people can see what you’re searching
for. Your searches are private; your friends cannot see what you are searching
for. Bing only connects with your Facebook network to bring you the content they
have “liked” and the people in your network you know. Your search information is
not shared back with your Facebook network.