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To be clear, this is only searching public posts. Its just that a large number of FB users either don't know, or don't care, what they are now broadcasting to the world.

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There's a little lock button under the status box that lets you set your privacy settings for each post. They should expand it to put the actual label of your privacy setting on the button, so people would see "Everyone" on the button when talking about their rectal surgery. I honestly think most people don't mind posting their thoughts for everyone to see (cf. Twitter), but there is definitely a minority that is doing so accidentally, and that's easy to fix.

The lock is especially powerful if you combine it with lists. For the longest time I didn't know about lists because I didn't use FB's chat or any similar features that revealed lists to me. Being able to quickly block just "Family" or "Old Bosses" via lists and locks is one security change FB made that really works for me.

(one big problem, though, is that I don't think there is a way from Facebook mobile to use the lock's functionality.)

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