It used to be the default way of finding your friends, before they introduced the whole 'give us your email account info to login and get all your contacts' feature. I use it all the time as well to check people from craigslist or other coldcalls. In fact, it's just about the only thing I still have an FB login for.
With all the discussions about privacy in the last couple years I am a little surprised at how many common sense approaches people seem to overlook or at least not implement. i.e. always have an email address for business, one personal/social (maybe these are separate), etc. and use them accordingly. The rest is up to you as far as how much access you allow to your profile, how willing you are to give up your real name to the service, and similar problems. Seems to me people have much more to fear from big data than someone who already has your email address being able to see your name and public profile pic.
This has always been a feature. It's useful when you want to find a friend with a common name that you know personally. This seems like it'd only be problematic if you linked your account to a professional email address...
What I'm wondering is, is this parameter new? I check privacy setting at least once a month and I really can't remember seeing this one which was set at "everyone". I NEVER set a parameter to "everyone"
Hold on, people can see if you have a profile or not, but it is not like they can see any of the information you have marked as not-public or friends only.
I don't see how this is a privacy issue. People can just google a name and get straight to someones public profile as well.
Something like that happens on Quora to. When you enter email adress and not password on login screen, profile image and name of the user which is registered with that email adress are appear.
With all the discussions about privacy in the last couple years I am a little surprised at how many common sense approaches people seem to overlook or at least not implement. i.e. always have an email address for business, one personal/social (maybe these are separate), etc. and use them accordingly. The rest is up to you as far as how much access you allow to your profile, how willing you are to give up your real name to the service, and similar problems. Seems to me people have much more to fear from big data than someone who already has your email address being able to see your name and public profile pic.