I cannot connect or see my PS3 friends under autologs screen "friends" section in NFS Rivals

Yes, I've been through all that and sent messages back and forth to make sure we weren't in a "private game" setting or public and so on... All our all drive settings are the same, I just spoke with 2 ppl about it. And I'm not sure by what you mean by "switching factions", if you mean go to cop career then back to racer and vice versa, I've done that many, many times.