Facebook Inc. (FB) Opens Your Photos, Contact Info – Sort Of

Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ:FB), which has transformed the world with its connectivity with millions of people, events and businesses around the world, has had some issues with respecting user privacy – especially in Europe (it’s had the most trouble with Germany, it seems). Now, while the company claims it is maintaining privacy stands, it has taken a couple of new steps to open uup users to be contacted through other means besides just being on Facebook.

Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ:FB) is working with Bing to present a Friends’ Photos feature, in which Bing visitors can navigate to a special page on the search engine site, log into Facebook and give Bing permission to connect. Once those steps are taken, a user can then browse friends’ albums easily, with all the photos showing up in a tiled view – which is different from Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ:FB), which uses a single-column, revense-chronological viewing system. Now of course, Bing says it respect privacy settings of Facebook users, so your friends who have certain privacy settings enabled won’t have their photos available to those on Bing.

In a related note, Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ:FB) has announced that it will let marketers locate prospects on Facebook by using users’ personal e-mail addresses and phone numbers. But before users panic, there is one caveat – in order for those marketing firms to mine for those prospects, the users must have provided that information to the marketer on its own. In other words, marketers an only mine for prospects from the information they’re already given by users who install apps on the network, for example.

As an example scenario, American Airlines could market to those Facebook users who have flown on the airline – the company would send its data on its passengers who booked flights and that data would be matched up with Facebook users information – though the data would be “hashed,” which means that neither American Airlines nor Facebook would actually know the individual identities of the American Airlines passengers to whom the marketing is being targeted.