September 6, 2006
Facebook Madness Continues
This is worse than I thought. The group I mentioned earlier with 10,000 users is now beyond 300,000. The message on the group page would have you believe that the privacy of users is at stake. I assure you, this is not the case! As Mark himself has posted:
We didn’t take away any privacy options. [Your privacy options remain the same.] The privacy rules haven’t changed. None of your information is visible to anyone who couldn’t see it before the changes. If you turned off your wall to non-friends, no one who is not your friend will be able to see a post on your wall. Your friends can still see it; it hasn’t changed. Secret groups and secret events remain secret from other people. Pokes and messages remain as private interactions. Nothing you do is being broadcast; rather, it is being shared with people who care about what you do—your friends.
In other words, the only change is that you don’t have to click through everyone’s profile to see changes. I feel like I’m repeating myself but I’m just in awe at the level of ignorance these changes are promoting. Here are some of the things many users thought were true after the new changes:
1. You are told when someone removes a friend or turns down a friend request.
2. You are told when someone messages someone else.
3. You cannot hide or remove this information.
In regards to 1, you are never told when someone turns down a friend request or removes someone from their friends list. 2, messages are private and are shared only between the sender, and the receiver. No one will ever know when you send a message to someone else. And finally, in regards to number 3, you can delete any notification easily from your profile page. What you see on your profile page is exactly the information which is put into the news feeds of other users. If you prefer to not see what’s going on with your friends, you can choose to hide the news feed, and it will never show up.
The main impression I get from most of the anti-Facebook groups (which is, in itself, quite ironic… especially the ones hoping to start a boycott) is that they don’t understand what Facebook is for.
Facebook is not like MySpace. The information in Facebook is shared, at the most, with your friends and everyone in your school and at the least with absolutely nobody. That’s right, you can have a Facebook profile and no one in the world will ever know. This wouldn’t be very fun, but if you’re really concerned about internet stalkers, you should play it safe. So, above all, we have a basic level of privacy. Let’s not forget that. Anonymous internet stalkers may be on Facebook, sure, but hopefully you don’t “friend” everyone in sight just to raise the number of friends on your list. This is sort of a philosophical difference between Facebook and MySpace. Though I don’t think it has caught on too well.
On MySpace, you friend everyone. Your friends, everyone from your high school class, all the bands you like, all your friends-friends, all the hot chicks who try to make even more friends… everyone. Some don’t follow this rule but friending is even beside the point. You don’t need to friend people to see most of the information in their profile. Unless they choose otherwise, everyone on the internet can see everything right away.
On Facebook, we see something a little different. The default privacy settings allow anyone from your school to see your profile. This is fine for most people. After all, plenty of that information would be available from the school’s website anyway (though that’s not a reason to have it available elsewhere). Outside of the school, people can only see that you exist. Many users take advantage of more restrictive privacy settings and don’t let anyone but friends see their profile. I think this is awesome.
Social networks that have strict standards of privacy and keep information secret between the users of the network are the ones that will last. If the news feed on Facebook shares anything about life on social networks, it’s that users trust too many other users with personal details about their lives. If you find yourself reading details about how so-and-so is now single again and you’ve never even met the person… it might be time to go through and clean out your friend list because you probably wouldn’t want them to read about your online life either. Keep in mind, no one, I repeat no one, will see that you unfriended anyone on Facebook.
If you can’t deal with the new changes, I encourage you to boycott Facebook. I hope they don’t remove the new features though. This “increased stalker potential” that many are talking about is completely inane. If you’re friends with stalkers, they already have access to this information! Solution: Don’t be friends with stalkers! If you don’t trust someone enough to let them see this information, you shouldn’t be friends with them. Simple. No need to complain that “stalkers are having their jobs made easier” just use a different service that doesn’t reveal so much to your “friends.” Either that, or actually think about who are your friends before letting them into your Facebook circle.
Kudos to everyone who’s creating and joining meaningful groups to discuss the new Facebook changes. The anti-Facebook groups are just kind of silly and I hope those people end up leaving. They never would, of course, but it would make the place a lot nicer to visit without all the complaining.
