simonlife

Honestly, I can’t say I’m all that surprised by the magnitude of this mass revolt that has rallied against Facebook’s new News Feed feature. There has always been an affected dislike for Facebook, even when most users themselves are so suspiciously fond of keeping an updated profile, and at least initially, I think it has something to do with people feeling cool when they get to use words like “sketchy” and “shady.”

I will assume for the moment that most of you are reading this post as a Facebook Note rather than directly from my blog, and thus already know what these News Feeds are all about. I will also safely assume that you hate them. However, for anyone reading this post on my blog without a Facebook account, just know that Facebook project leader and owner Mark Zuckerberg has implemented a site feature that catalogs any and all events that involve any of the friends in any of your social networks. With it, you know exactly when couples break up, when someone posts a photo of you, and when John Doe decides to leave all 672 of his groups, one at a time.

Context

To make this discussion at all coherent, it is necessary to first establish a few contextual facts, the first being that Facebook is a social networking service. It is built on the same functional paradigm as its predecessors and existing imitations (namely, Friendster and MySpace), and its self-evident purpose then is to connect people with common personal or professional pursuits and backgrounds. Anyone you choose to “friend” on Facebook is someone you care about, pretend to care about, or recognize simply as a peer. These are people you (probably) know in real life; being Facebook friends is simply an acknowledgement of that fact.

Also, it should be noted that anything you publish on the Internet, in general, outside the confines of a strictly protected service is viewable by anyone with at least the same access rights as you. Not that anyone ever reads the terms-of-service agreement or the privacy policy, users are expected to understand that any posted personal information may be “read, collected, or used” by any other user. But so what? You already knew this to be true.

Your Privacy & The Stalker

Recently, I observed the following entries on my Facebook News Feed (among many others):

• 15 of your friends joined the group Students against Facebook News Feed (Official Petition to Facebook). 9:56am
• Jennifer Cha joined the group The Facebook feed feature is stalkerish and should be disabled immediately. 8:55am

Evidently, this new feature is so offensive that it has set in motion some of man’s most ruthless political agents: cult followings and groupthink. Though on a much smaller and less direct scale in this particular case, these phenomena have led people to believe that the News Feed extends Facebook’s potential as a tool for stalker-like behavior. I will admit that this argument bears some truth in identifying the criminality of facilitating what is already possible, but let us remember what a stalker actually is. Stalkers of the on-line breed are notorious because of their persistence and ability to effectively “mine” for and extract pre-existing information about their targets. That said, a stalker who only employs Facebook will never discover more about someone than is already available through the Facebook network itself.

The simple truth of the matter is that your privacy is completely under your control, even without Zuckerberg’s recent rehash of the feature. The News Feed itself does nothing to generate new, unreleased content; rather, it simply surfaces existing information, events, and social states and displays them in a readable format. Any Facebook stalker with at least some experience in his practice will likely have found this information anyway — wouldn’t really be much of a stalker otherwise.

And so, given anything that anyone might be able to find out about you through Facebook: it is probably the case that you already knew about the public scope of that information. Anything you didn’t divulge yourself could have just as easily found its way to someplace outside the realm of Facebook (e.g. on someone’s blog or photo journal), and the confidentiality of that material is at the discretion of the content owner. If Bob knows you broke up with your boyfriend, your privacy in such a matter is only as good as Bob’s willingness to keep his mouth shut.

Why People Are Going Nuts

Despite what I’ve just said, everyone’s still having a heart attack over the domain of their personal information — people leave groups or get tagged on a photo, and when they see that those actions are recorded on someone’s News Feed, they cry about a violation of their privacy. They suddenly start to worry about stalkers, as if stalkers were totally inept at what they do and couldn’t figure things out without an automated feed.

Furthermore, I suspect that people may be confusing the sensitivity of personal information with the annoyance of being exposed to material they just don’t care about. Like other users, I usually don’t care when someone leaves a group, and in this way, it is a legitimate grievance to complain that the News Feed is excessively comprehensive. However, this is not a matter of privacy so much as it is a matter of content management, and as the updates to the News Feed demonstrate, the Facebook engineers were well aware of this design flaw.

Chill Out

You have no need to fear Facebook… at least any more than you need to fear the Internet itself. Essentially, if you don’t want people to see it, don’t post it. That’s just about as simple as it gets, and if something that might compromise your privacy still makes it to Facebook, your real concern should be the users with access to such sensitive information — the people with incriminating photos of you or the people writing Notes about you. It’s their choice, not Facebook’s, whether to make your life a public affair.