Early this afternoon, Gawker.com exposed a new (as yet unannounced) feature on Facebook: Put your cursor in the 'search' box, press the down arrow, and a list of five names will appear.

The early speculation was that the list represented the five people who search for your profile most on the site.

Naturally, as with most changes having to do with Facebook, hysteria ensued. More than 200 comments were posted on the original Gawker item and new theories began to surface. Was this the five most recent people to search you? The five people you search for most often? A coding error? A random glitch?

The waking fear sinking into the hearts of Facebook users everywhere was that if the first theory was true and you could see them ... then they could see you. That meant every ex-boyfriend or secret crush that you've been checking on daily is now wise to your level of interest.

"This is going to make seeing the ex more awkward in person," wrote one Gawker commenter.

"CRAPSHITFUCK," wrote another. "Why, Facebook, why? I thought we had a stalkery understanding?"

It's an open secret that the vast majority of Facebook users spend far more time than we would ever admit browsing the personal information provided by friends, whether out of boredom or hidden interest.

Facebook exposing that would mean violating users' trust, significantly discouraging the habit, and seemingly spelling disaster for a social networking website dependant on that activity to generate page views.

But within a few hours, Facebook had pulled the feature, circulating the following explanation to the press:

"Facebook tries to surface the people we think are most important to users to make it easier and faster for them to navigate the site and find what they are looking for. The search drop down is not a list of those that have searched for the user. It is also not a list of people whose profile the user has viewed the most or who have viewed the user's profile the most. To avoid any confusion, this will no longer appear."

Do we believe it? Given the disconnect with Facebook's general privacy policies — users are still smarting over the intrusive Beacon advertising "feature" launched and quickly spiked last December — as well as the obvious risks of the feature, it seems unlikely that Facebook would lift the veil of secrecy on your browsing behavior unannounced.

Crisis averted. Stalk at will.

by Liz Gunnison