The outcry suggests the exhibitionism and voyeurism implied by participation in social networking sites has ill-defined but nonetheless real limits, and expectations of privacy have somehow survived the publishing free-for-all. For many people, apparently, pushing information to everyone on a friends list is not at all the same as publishing the same information on one’s own page for those people to find. —Michael Calore —Privacy Fears Shock Facebook (Wired)
Thanks for the suggestion, Karissa.
It doesn’t sound as if Facebook is acknowledging that a vocal portion of its users might have legitimate cause to be concerned.
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I think this is also evidence of a kind of turf war. The millions of teen users are thinking of the space as “theirs,” but it’s a business, and the users are part of the product that’s sold to advertisers.
Frankly, it doesn’t sound to me like the users have any “legitimate” cause to be concerned.
It sounds like me like people are shocked, angered, and distraught to be constantly reminded that their publicly published pictures and writings are. actually. available. PUBLICY! OMG!
It’s pretty funny, really. It seems to me like a sort of shooting-the-messenger situation. They were simply much happier when it was easier to pretend that only the people they wanted to look at their stuff was looking at it.
I am noticing that Facebook’s mini-feeds are not getting a positive reaction from users, which is evidenced by new groups forming in protest, yet nobody I know is willing to stop using it completely. Facebook provides a rationale for these feeds showing all social moves a user makes within its network (except sending messages) as being what other users are looking for when they sign in, but mini-feeds change what users looked for from something subtle to something obvious. I would love to see the usability reports justifying these mini-feed additions.