The knowledge that anyone who stumbles across my logged-in profile can see who I'm interested in by experimenting in my friend search bar has a chilling effect on the profiles I view. Google and most browsers have a 'clear search history' feature- it would be nice if facebook had the same.

Facebook doesn't show which profiles you've viewed explicitly for a good reason - I think they were just hoping that this would be obfuscated enough not to get much notice.

In other words, you don't trust the people you trust. Perhaps you need to rethink your behavior, based on your revelation that you don't actually trust them.

Some of us have had significant others with jealousy issues. It's not that we don't trust them, it's just better if they don't worry about silly issues like whose Facebook profiles we've been perusing. Not because it's a secret or because there is anything to hide, just because it helps the SO control their counter-productive impulses if they aren't informed on the matter.

That same kind of avoidance can be applicable in all other sorts of relationships. It's not that the people aren't trusted, it's just that there's no reason to know, and it will only cause damage if they find out -- not because it's bad or trust-breaking, but because the person's reaction may be problematic for completely different reasons (compulsions, or potential taint of future circumstance).

It just doesn't make sense to insist that both (a) I want to leave everything unlocked and open; and (b) I don't want anyone to be able to see what's there.

You've got every right to protect your privacy from prying eyes. But if you want to do so, do it.

I normally don't bother logging out of whatever sites I'm logged in to.

I'm not too bothered what she sees if she opens up the Facebook tab with me logged in - but I can see that it may be a problem for some.

And I don't think that "hand it over for five minutes to check something" is that uncommon a use-case.

I'm not too bothered what she sees if she opens up the Facebook tab with me logged in - but I can see that it may be a problem for some."

That's the crux of it - you're not bothered by it. If you were bothered, surely you'd hit the 'log out' button?

"here - look at this interesting article on Wikipedia" ... she starts reading ... ... I get bored and go to make cup of tea, forgetting that I hadn't logged out of Facebook ... ... she finishes article, closes tab and finds herself on my Facebook page ...

It is my fault, but a "clear history" (or at least make my history invisible) function would mean that mistakes like the above will have much less impact

The potential "victum's fault" is still no excuse.

Come on. This is a personal responsibility issue and nothing else.

It's not about who you search or view. It's all just a big guess at who you might be interested in. From what I've gathered, it tries to find probable relationships based on all of these factors:

Comments, Likes, Tags, Events, Applications, Friends, and Work and Education data

Note that those are both your own comments, etc, and those of the people it's trying to relate you to. Who knows exactly how it combines all those to come up with its guesses, but I'm quite positive it has fairly little to do with who you're actually viewing (though I'll admit, maybe that's a small factor in there, too).

However, I've removed all imported friend finder contacts on https://www.facebook.com/invite_history.php some weeks ago.

I guess this implies that Facebook does not really remove the imported information, but that it keeps this information and just hides those contacts from you in the friend finder interface.

Find somebody on your mystery list who isn't a friend of your friends, and then you can get paranoid.

In Mozilla, the first person ranked was at -6.2650374; on Chrome, it was -7.2581474 (I go back and forth with this person quite a bit). Also, the ranking of some of the people were different.

My guess is something to do with browser cookies or caching - any ideas why this might be the case?

OT, but for the second time this year, someone is newly (just as of today) using one of my secondary Gmail accounts as their FB user ID. They don't appear to have access to the Gmail account -- and I've newly killed any concurrent sessions and then changed its password and security Q/A to be sure. So, I don't know how they're accomplishing this. But that Gmail account received the sign up confirmation messages and is now filling up with friend confirmations.

Any chance you could plug me into someone relevant at FB, as this appears to be a recurring problem without a ready explanation? Email to pasbesoin at that gmail place.

P.S. As best I can determine, my systems are clean, and I've no other problems/compromises that are apparent. There appears to be something borked with the Facebook account creation confirmation process.