Nov 03 2010
Facebook and Privacy Issues
Throughout Facebook’s history, many new applications and features have been added to the website. In my opinion, through observations of my friend’s statuses, it always seems that everyone always hates the new features at first. For example, in 2006 when the “news feed” came into play, I remember all of my friends saying something of the sort: this is soooo creepy! I can’t believe I now have the ability to freely and easily stalk all of my Facebook friends.
Boyd and Hargittai back my claim up by stating, “While none of the information that was shared on the News Feed had previously been hidden, the automatic aggregation and publicization of it sparked outrage. Many users believed that there was a significant difference between knowing that someone changed their relationship status by regularly visiting the person’s profile and seeing it listed as an action in the News Feed” (Boyd & Hargittai, 2010).
Although most everyone was completely shocked and almost outrageous at Facebook’s new stalking feature aka the news feed, everyone got over it, learned to live with it. Now I don’t know how we would use Facebook, if it weren’t for the news feed. The news feed allows users to easily interact with other users pictures, statuses, wall posts and everything. It’s interesting because at first people were frightened of its stalking capabilities and now its used as the crutch. For example, a friend may say something about how they saw on their news feed a certain status or relationship break up. Now, its no longer considered creepy, if we didn’t have the news feed I believe people would think that knowing certain things found on their facebook page would be more creepy/stalker-ish because people actually have to search and look for it. Although at first, users may have felt that the news feed invaded their privacy, it is now just seen as a tactic to keep up to date and interactive with your friends.
One Facebook feature that did cross the line was called the Beacon feature. In 2007, Facebook introduced the Beacon advertisement feature, which shared users actions with external partner websites. So when users bought a product from websites such as overstock.com, eBay, blockbuster.com, campusfood.com, etc., the purchase linked to their Facebook page and showed up on their friend’s mini-feeds. This feature completely crossed the privacy line, which is why the feature was taken down and sued in many different lawsuits.
My second set of questions, Why is that Facebook’s privacy policies and settings so unadvertised by Facebook? Is it just me or does it seem like the Facebook doesn’t really want you to know about the privacy policies? And also, is it just me or is all of the writing and information on how to use the settings overwhelming and unhelpful?
Being extremely Facebook savy and a daily user, I know how to maneuver around the website, but so many people use Facebook and I am sure that a majority of the users have no idea how to even use the privacy settings. Although Facebook went through the privacy setting changes in 2009, which prompted users to change their settings, even Boyd and Hargittai stated that many users just went through the prompt clicking the default settings. I think that facebook needs to make a promotional video that demonstrates and further explains how people can use the privacy settings to their advantage. Lets be honest, reading on the web is sissies. Just kidding. But really, not many people take the time to read a large blurb of text on a website, which is really the only guidance the privacy settings provide.