Of Facebook and Big Brother…

So, Slashdot had a posting discussing the new changes on Facebook, which many of you use frequently… As many of you noticed this morning when you logged on to change your status, there’s a new “feeds” feature that really ramps up the stalking factor to a whole new level… Personally, I didn’t really care that much, besides the fact that I can’t seem to find a way to disable it.

Well…apparently more than a few people are rather annoyed about it, pointing out a variety of privacy issues…according to Slashdot, though, many “protest groups” have formed, the largest of which has 10,000 members… I link to CampusProgress.org and a student homepage at some university I’ve never heard of (University of Mary Washington, anybody?) as examples of just how irate some people are over the changes. A few quotes from the latter link were kinda amusing, regardless:

“When we join facebook, we automatically give up a little bit of our privacy. To use Facebook has always been ‘socially-acceptable stalking.’ Now, though, they’ve just gone too damned far. No one wants their girlfriend or boyfriend knowing when they’ve commented on a photo, written on a wall, or anything else. No one wants people to see that they’ve left a group; it could offend someone. No one really wants to see the change in status of someone’s love life.”

And from the CollegeProgress article:

“A Facebook profile now displays your online social exploits since mid- August. It notes when you wrote on someone?s wall, and when you commented on a photo, along with other new details such as your responses to event invitations, your new friends, and what groups you join. Before, as many of us know, you could write on a wall in relative privacy. It could be a sneaky affair. And commenting on someone else?s photo was something that few would notice. Wall and comment communications, while public, were not advertised.

Now, every time you do anything on Facebook, you issue a bulletin for all of your friends. Now no one will miss the fact that you think you look horrible in a picture, or that you didn’t accept an invitation to someone’s event, or that you wrote what you considered to be a funny item for your list of activities (‘Trying not to incriminate myself on facebook to all my future employers’) and then thought better of it ten minutes later and took it down.”

I dunno…personally, I figure that if you’re posting this kind of information on Facebook in the first place, you’re just asking for trouble…but at the same time, I can understand where problems can and will arise. Needless to say, I’m a). glad I’m not in college anymore, and b). glad I’m married.

Any thoughts?