Latest news reports that popular social networking site Facebook has made all of the profiles of their members available for viewing by anyone on the web, even if they are not a registered member of Facebook. This move has been described by Facebook to be ''driven purely by profit motives'' but they claim that ''the information revealed would be minimal''.

Members of social networking sites such as Bebo, Myspace, Hi5 and Facebook who have set their profiles to ''Public'' in the privacy settings are susceptible to having their pages accessed by future employers or teachers for evaluation and analysis of the member's personality.

A number of my friends have done this, and I give the following advice to anyone who is susceptible: Your profiles can be accessed even by searching in Google, so future authoritative figures may decide to query your names to find out what kind of person you are. I advise you all to set your profiles to either Private or at least ''Friends only'' to prevent this occurring.

According to Facebook, profiles will be indexed by popular search engines within one month. The countdown to the major privacy breach begins..

Alex Kara

Kara Media Corporation