No, there's no permission involved on the Google or Facebook side, or at least, there wasn't for me. My understanding from Google's description above is that t

No, there's no permission involved on the Google or Facebook side, or at least, there wasn't for me. My understanding from Google's description above is that they are scraping the logged out facebook.com profiles; your logged out profile has a random selection of friends on it. There are enough of them there for Google to infer that facebook.com/kma (me, who is friends with Nick Schrock, e.g.) is the same Keith Adams as kmadams_at_gmail_dot_com (also me, who also has written emails to someone named Nick Schrock). Without clicking through anything on either site, I started getting little faces in my search results last month saying "So-And-So, your friend on Facebook, shared this on Twitter." Here's a screenshot of the results I was seeing: http://imgur.com/0ctAO http://imgur.com/0ctAO Disclosure: I write code for Facebook. I had nothing to do with this whole thing, and cannot officially speak for FB. It could also be the case that I am in a A/B test Google is performing, etc. This was just my experience. It fits with Google's stated mechanisms for how Social Circles work.