Facebook's new Discover People feature could invade your privacy

It’s a new year, and Facebook once again has a new feature. This one’s called “Discover People” and it has been designed from the ground up to get you connected (for whatever reason) to new people.

TechCrunch reported the new feature that will be available on both Android and iOS devices, also stating that the new feature has not reached 100 percent of users. In short, it may take some time to show up on your smartphone as this appears to be a server side update.

The new section appears below Moves or Device Requests and above Find Wi-Fi or Pages in the settings tab of the Facebook app. Tap on it and you will be guided to complete parts of your profile to make it presentable to your new to be friends and connections that will be flocking to your page to check you out.

Once your done with that you get your profile page of sorts that will let you connect with other Discover People users along with a list of upcoming events where you will find like minded users.

Tapping on an event will however show you a long list of people instead of the usual event details. A standard rule of the Discover People section is that it will never show you profiles of your current Facebook friends.

The catch however, is that your Facebook Profile becomes accessible to everyone. Marked yourself as attending a Facebook event? Well, that post is public and so are the details of your profile for those attending it.

Indeed, it sounds like an invasion of privacy. While most Facebook users would not bother much about this situation, you do enter stalker territory, when you swipe through profiles.

So like it or not, you may get a few odd requests from random users going forward. A wise thing to do is update your privacy settings and your profile, to keep up with Facebook’s changing policies.

Facebook may have opened up two new avenues with the Discover Page. There’s one that’s inching closer to LinkedIn and also turning into smaller dating app by helping make new connections. But for privacy freaks, you need to update those privacy settings as soon as possible.