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Facebook Changes Provoke Uproar Among Users
coastal984 writes, "Facebook, the college (and now, high school and professional) networking site, launched changes to their web site this morning, provoking a massive and immediate response, and not the one the company had hoped for. Hundreds of protest 'Groups' formed, the largest of which have over 10,000 members, and sites like this student portal sprang up to pour scorn on the recent changes. The biggest gripe is the new "News Feed" on every page that tracks recent changes, activities, and comments made by everyone the user is connected to, such as a change in a user's relationship status." These details were all public previously, but it was only through intentional browsing that they would be discovered. In the words of one user, "Stalking is supposed to be hard."
They're taking all of the sport out of it.
WHOOSH
I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding of what sites like Facebook are.
That's public information, folks!
If you don't want to be stalked, don't put your personal information online. All of the data these "feeds" display can be found through browsing anyways. This just centralizes it. I rather like this feature myself.
-dave
http://millionnumbers.com/ - own the number of your dreams
I like my victims easy... but maybe that's just me. I'm not in it for the rewards, just the sweet treat at the end.
http://www.middlesell.com.nyud.net:8090/stopitface book.php - just in case it can't hold up.
Yeah, I noticed these changes last night right before I went to bed. It is, simply put, damn creepy. Obviously all of the information given by the news feed would be normally available to the attentive and compulsive facebook browser, but having it all summarized is just bizzare. Person X has joined the "Asexual Students" club. Person Y has endorsed this candidate. I guess it's a little less weird when it's not simply a list of everything my school acquaintances have done in the last 24 hours.
The fact is it's too much information. I don't want to see what everyone is doing every five seconds and neither does anyone else. Assuming I had something like 500 friends I'd see a lot of information about people I rarely if ever talk to on a daily basis. Moreover, the system keeps track, for a time, of deleted information - prompting users of the change. While it's true that all the information on a persons profile is "public" to their friends at least, it takes the mystery out of poking around facebook to see what has changed etc. They should at least make an option to enable/disable your facebook digest in other peoples feeds. A good idea in principle, but in practice it's a dud in my opinion.
As a college student and a participant of facebook I am one of the surprisingly few people who LIKE that's right LIKE the new layout. It makes it feel more like my google homepage/thunderbird rss reader. While some of the information is extraneous I think a trimmed down version of this idea would be appropriate. Oh and most people don't realize this but there is a arrow at the top of the section like the one next to "sections" in the left column here on slashdot that allows you to collapse the information. Finally when you are using any social networking site you are distributing private information about you to the public and I think this serves as an excellent wake-up call to users who have been unaware of the consequences of doing so.
I am in an oral communications class where we have to give How To speeches. My topic was "How to stalk people on facebook." I was going to cover the FBStalker firefox extension, as well as using the computer a person last logged in from to see who has been visiting your profile (using a link to a personal homepage with webstats). Then I woke up this morning and I see Facebook completely changed itself to obsolete the first half of my presentation and break the ability to do the second half. Thank god we ran out of time, or else I'd have been just standing there with nothing to say.
They aggregated any and all changes in your friend's profiles (info changed, friends added, pictures added, etc...) on your homepage long before Facebook did.
The feed isn't showing anything not already public, this is true.
However, it shows things that you might not really feel like broadcasting to the world, even if you don't feel like it needs to be a secret. For example, when a couple splits up, everyone in your network now gets a message saying "John Smith has changed his status from 'In a relationship' to 'Single'." Not really private information, and obviously having that on your profile at all means your comfortable with other people knowing your relationship status, but there's such a lack of respect or discretion for the real world situation that it's just incredibly dehumanizing.
Another example: my friend is vacationing in Europe right now, and she just posted a message to her boyfriend's wall about wishing he was there and related sappy whatnot. Sure the wall was already the most public way someone could post a message, but it was just a message on that person's page, not a message that gets broadcasted to everyone else in either person's network, front and center.
The point here is that there's a big difference between simply not hiding information and blasting that information through a loudspeaker.
If you get nervous, just remember that there are a few billion other people who don't really give a damn.
While I do agree this is a bad thing and it should be opt-in rather then opt-out, you can remove all of these notes so other can't see them from your profile page.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
I'm a new college student, I use Facebook, and I was browsing this morning when the new changes went into effect. I think it's stupid, the information is public but having a detailed log of every change you make to your profile publicly visible makes it a lot easier for people to figure things out. Example: I don't want a list of the people that I added to my friends list in the last few days. That's just a little unnerving. I also don't want a lot of the groups that I decided to leave available. I don't want links to all the forum posts I make or image comments I make right there on my main page. Like the post and article say, it's all public information, and of course I understand this when I sign up for Facebook. But publicly advertising it all on the main profile DOES make it a lot easier to find. There didn't used to be a way to track down all of my forum posts, and I don't like that record being available. It's creepy having this public list of everything you do. Facebook now even highlights in yellow all of the updates to your profile. Not only does this create unnecessary clutter, it blatantly advertises the changes in my life that I feel comfortable documenting, but do not want highlighted. A break up is a good example. It's a big brother thing. I know that there are property records listing my name and address, and that's okay. When my county posts an easily searchable database on the front of their main webpage, it makes me a little more uncomfortable. I know some friends who used these records to find a teacher's house to vandalize. It's a similar concept, people do not want to feel like they're being watched and monitored. It's human instinct, and while it might seem a little hypocritical because you're making the information public, no one wants someone watching their every move. Like AOL releasing the search records, you can learn a lot about someone from those records even though as separate entities they don't mean anything. It's all pieces of a puzzle that leaves me feeling just a little too exposed.
The internet is meant to be searched and information wants to be free, no? Posting on the internet that someone is out of town is a bad idea. Especially if they don't want their house broken into. What, you think criminals don't use the internet? If you don't "feel like broadcasting it to the world" don't say it online. Better yet, don't say it at all. You are responsible for what you say.
... no wait That is only when the government is spying into your private life, not your friends.
Personally, I don't have a problem with the information being there. I just have a problem with that HUGE amount of information in my face all the time. I don't care who added a new book to their favorites; if I wanted to know someone's favorite books, I read through their profile.
The site design of Facebook is getting closer and closer to being as ugly as myspace/youtube.
Anyone else think the comments just weren't rendering right before they turned off ABP and saw ads?
The referenced 10,000 member group now numbers over 47,000 (if you have a facebook login, you can view it at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2208288769). There is also an online petition now, with more than 3,700 signatures located at http://www.petitiononline.com/faceb00k/petition.ht ml
"However, it shows things that you might not really feel like broadcasting to the world, even if you don't feel like it needs to be a secret."
I'm dating my left hand.
Imeem at least has a neat granular privacy model and a load of options that lets you customize the feeds and updates, rather than the complete mess that facebooks half assed clone of the feature is offering.
But imeem is going through something similar, the latest version of their client software relies much more on the website so there's a small number of users who violently oppose the changes.
It's just that time of year that all the social networks revamp themselves for the college's returning I guess.
man its froshweek im posting totally blasted with nothing to do and all you kids can talkj about is how your "rpriacyax" on on a public website is being affected. off the internet and into the booze dammnit
ps did i use ":affected" in the correct way or shold it be "effected" some granmmar nazis help me pout here
And furthermore, if you really have to tell people but don't want to tell people, you can delete "events" from showing up in the feed by clicking the little x. (Yes, that interjection I added there confuses me too.)
-dave
http://millionnumbers.com/ - own the number of your dreams
WAAAAHHHH A free website that I waste time on added features I don't like... WAAAAHHHH
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Instead of being a bulletin board for people to post their current information, Facebook now has created a convenient log of every little action a person does, giving an in-depth look at one's past as well as current public information.
For me, it isn't so much the new 'stalking' potential, it is the fact that the new layout is extremely visually offensive. Seriously, it was so ugly that I logged in and immediately considered cancelling my account. It is so insane busy that I can't seem to decipher any of the information presented. Right now I'm waiting to see if they come to their senses or otherwise I'll kiss facebook goodbye.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
This has to be one of the silliest things I've ever heard. A large number of people are unwilling to be held accountable for their actions (leaving a "group", becoming single), and they're blaming the website for it. Even with the old site, someone could randomly choose your profile, and post all of the same information on the cover of the NY Times every single day. And what would your only option be? The same as it is now - don't publish that information on a public website if you don't intend for the world to know about it.
Remember, when you break up with someone, there's no requirement that you go update your profile on facebook. Some of these people make it sound like there's no other way around any of this..
I agree with the parent post. Maybe it felt nice to have the illusion of some semblance of privacy on the facebook before, but the simple fact is that this is just making the consequences of your actions on the site much much more clearly visible (to yourself as well as others). Frankly I think its good that people might (hopefully) think twice about what they share online. (Plus, I am an avid facebook friend stalker. There, I admit it.)
"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals."
I was totally waiting for something like this. If there's something on your personal feed you don't want there, you can totally delete it. Now what I want is so RSS that I can pump the newsfeed over to my customized Google homepage.
-dave
http://millionnumbers.com/ - own the number of your dreams
This one is a bit more subtle, but it annoys me more than the "feeds" and "stories" thing. I'm bothered by the fact that the "education" section used to be one of the first things you saw when you logged in. Now it requires scrolling. This echos the whole fact that facebook is moving towards a more general, myspace-like site. I only found the site useful because I could find people in my classes and ask them questions if need be. All this other stuff is starting to get superfluous, and clutter-like.
"Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." - Richard Feynman
In the words of one user, "Stalking is supposed to be hard."
So it's gotten to the point now where even stalking is automated. Kids today have it so easy. When I was their age, I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid for breakfast, work twenty-nine hours a day down at the mill, and pay the mill owner for permission to come to work. When we got home, our Dad would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
I don't agree with you I'm sorry.
When you break up, you tell your friends, eventually. You might ring them and let them know, they might ring you and ask how things are and you tell them.
However, you don't get all your friends on a Telephone conference call and say "My girlfriend and I broke up, thanks!", or take out an ad in the local paper saying "Attn to all my friends: I broke up!"
That's the situation here. Yes, it's public info. People want it to be public (so I don't think your arguement stands up) They would just rather people find things out because they want to find out, not because it's flashed in front of them.
Seriously, this is not that hard of a concept. (Said only because you said it. See how much of it a dick it makes you sound?)
...but the fact that your home page is constantly updated by every little thing each of your friends does. Add a new photo? Bingo, alert, plus a thumbnail of the photo to clutter the page. Write something on another person's wall? You'll get a copy of the message on your main page. Most of us, if we care about every little detail of a friend's life, will intentionally browse that person's profile ourselves, as we spend enough time aimlessly surfing the site anyway.
"It's a reverse vampire...they....they crave the sun!"
-dave
http://millionnumbers.com/ - own the number of your dreams
I got back from work today, propped the dorm room door open, slid off my shoes, and logged into Facebook. I could hear the uproar all the way down the hall that the new Facebook was now stalker central. I looked around at the changes and realized why they were saying this... it's one thing to have an interaction with specific people, while it's another thing for all your friends to be notified that you're having that interaction. I'm not a Facebook creep, so it's really not that big of a deal, but anyone who spends too much time on Facebook like I do is quickly going to realize these changes are overkill. To notify everyone of every little change is a bit much... maybe when someone posts some new pictures... fine. Maybe for interactions between you and the person. But to see everything they do with everyone? It's going too far.
One key difference in this new system is that it effectively serves as a history system. People are saying that all this information was available already, but there's a difference between current information being available and an entire history of changes being available... Just ask Wikipedia. If I had some information up before, and I wanted to remove it, I can't do it anymore... it's effectively permanently there.
Capitalism + Community + Personnal Info... this new feature is just to make it easier for those marketing guys to gather the info on people.
...oh! i almost forgot! ...this other thing, you know, profits to make.
Lets not be blind to the fact that those who run such sites are companies, which means they have bills to pay.
from the feed...
6 of your friends joined the group This New Facebook Is Creepy. 9:49pm
6 of your friends joined the group the "news feed" on facebook is creepy and i hate it. 9:11pm
* joined the group People Against the Face Book News Feed. 6:38pm
* joined the group Facebook: Data Mining Since 2004. 5:14pm
* and * joined the group Facebook Sucks Now. 3:46pm
Saying that concern is misplaced because the information is already public is akin to supporting videotaping everyone in public and broadcasting it. Sure, the information is out there, but it's a question of accessibility. Like a few people see a guy leaving a HIV clinic. Is there a difference if we then send a letter to everyone he knows saying that he was seen leaving a HIV clinic?
This facebook kerfluffle will reach an equilibrium. People will either migrate to Myspace (eeew) or simply put less information out there about themselves, learning that just because there's a space for a response doesn't mean you have to fill it in. Or facebook may make the newsfeeds optional, or eliminate them totally. That's the free-market at work, dude.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
and for the next update they're going to make all their users wear that dynamic LED jacket seen on slashdot a few days ago and it will scroll the newsfeed :-D
now stop reading and go play Dance Dance Revolution!
... if your 500 something facebook friends were all your real friends. However, they aren't, and I dont really care that so-and-so became friends with so-and-so. Whenever I go on facebook, I browse through maybe 5-6 pages, all of whom are my friends. I dont really care about what the rest of my class are up to.
It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.
Damnit. I have to admit, I see your point.
When I break up, I tell my friends privately on the phone. I don't take an ad out in the public notices for my friends to check on when they want to...
I was wrong!
Tim
When you break up, you tell your friends, eventually. You might ring them and let them know, they might ring you and ask how things are and you tell them.
However, you don't get all your friends on a Telephone conference call and say "My girlfriend and I broke up, thanks!", or take out an ad in the local paper saying "Attn to all my friends: I broke up!"
Exactly. Email your friends, tell them you've broken up. Don't post it on a public site.
Putting it in your profile - or posting about it on your blog, or announcing it on an IRC network - is taking out an ad, or putting a nice big notice on the bulletin board in the lobby. It's public - don't be surprised that the public finds out about it.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
I meet so many people who don't realise how easy it is for their friends (and enemies) to get information of this sort from the net. Why do they think they're posting it if they don't want it available to the general public? This is a healthy wakeup call for the ignorant.
hehe...those complaints seem to be a twisted use of language. I think that the new futures (especially the feed) are great! You can delete the feeds that you don't want others to see, so there's no problem with privacy.
Perhaps if they setup a preferences page to allow the users to select what to display and what to hide,
If you don't want the world to know it, don't put it online. That is how you "select what to display."
Even for public information, there is a difference between announcing status and announcing changes in status. One is a snapshot of the state of the person's information, the other provides a temporal dimension where one can track or notice when changes in state occurred. Facebook users may have no problem announcing the former("yes, I'm single") vs. the latter ("..single as of last night when my gf dumped me").
In any case, Facebook should immediately make this an opt-in feature, with control over which "deltas" of state you are willing to disseminate. Good social networking is all about personal control.
If anything, this feature should reveal stalkers. It shows what other people do, not exclusively you; thus, go ahead and read your friends' wallposts and study his habits. It's not what you do; it's what other people do which really makes this feature so interesting.
Personally, I always suspected that one of my friend's was a Facebook troll. Now it's perfectly clear to all parties, not just the one guy who manually reads wall posts.
Ideally they would just make a security feature which enables you to disable your personal feed. But still, this is greater than it seems.
You tell your friends "eventually", but the first thing you do is rush to Facebook and update your status so all the freshmen can start hitting you up? If I was your friend, I might be a little offended to be relegated to "of lower importance than social networking website".
heh. Don't get me wrong, I hate these social networking sites myself. I'm not sticking up for them at all.
Anyway, I realise I was wrong, as already pointed out quite cleary by a couple of people.
The point here is that there's a big difference between simply not hiding information and blasting that information through a loudspeaker.
There WAS such a difference. Before the internet existed.
Not any more.
This reminds me of the uproar when dejanews first appeared on the scene. All these people who had made public posts to usenet under a mistaken belief that what they said would never go beyond the little "community" of that group were very unhappy to see all of there messages in a searchable database. Thing was - all of their messsages were already in searchable databases, deja was just the first time these people had access to a database themselves.
They were ignorant before and they highly resented their englightenment. Just like these facebook users. The information has always been there for the taking and even if no "private" aggregation/stalking tool existed before facebook rolled out their changes it is enough that such a tool could have existed.
Facebook's only crime here is speaking the truth.
At least now these people are aware of just how "stalkable" they have always been and can take steps to reduce their vulnerability. It's possible the result will be a mass exodus from Facebook. That's what I would consider the rational response because there is no way in hell *I* would have ever signed up in the first place since I already knew just how much such social-networking systems are the antithesis to personal privacy. For some reason, I don't think the end result here is going to be very rational, though.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Close, but I was thinking about those surveillance cameras that the british use. Or what retailers do while you're shopping. Or when you're at the airport... Funny how arbitrary the lines really are.
It's so easy to ridicule Facebook users for being ignorant about posting public information but Facebook has to listen to its users or risk losing them. Facebook has to eliminate the new features regardless of what the "responsible for all your actions" smarties out there say. It's a usability problem.
Also, there is an important difference between giving the public access to personal information and announcing it.
People are not interested in your personal information so why serve it as frontpage news? They should actively search for it. Let's not compare this to "security through obscurity". It's more like preferring not to live in a glass house.
The outraged users are used to a certain level of public disclosure and Facebook has changed its product so that level has shifted from some quasi-private state to a completely transparent one. If enough users don't like it then Facebook has to change it.
It's not like the Internet is being coerced to the demands of some ignorant users. It's Facebook. I don't use it and I don't care about it. But I understand the problems that some users have with it and I take issue with arrogant people who don't understand the issues some users have with it and are quick to judge them.
Well, why would you add a feature if you were facebook?
They must want to either:
A) add more users
OR
B) make more money
OR
C) make existing users more happy
Sorry if the top two sound pessimistic, but
commericalization/monetization frequently happens
to even the best community-based sites.
If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
Don't give up so easily. You're right that there is still a fundamental difference between the old and new systems. They changed the system, pure and simple, and people are allowed to make a fuss about it if they don't like it. When you used to do X, Y would happen. Now when you do X, Y and Z both happen. Some people want just Y to happen without Z. You can say how similar Y and Z are all you want, but there is *still* a difference. Let's say that you have information you want people to find out but you don't want to tell them. I have plenty of friends who mark Gay on their Orientation. I'm sure they feel perfectly fine with people knowing they are gay if they look (just like they'd be okay letting people know they're gay if they ask.. this is essentially an automated Q&A), but they don't want to just go spam everyone with an update saying, "Hey guys, I'm gay! Just wanted to let you know!" There's simply a difference in the way the information is handled, and that means that people should and will behave differently knowing that. There's nothing wrong if people don't like it.
When I saw these changes for the first time, I did not think about how my privacy or other's privacy would be harmed. All of the information was sort of public in the first place (users can adjust privacy settings, but by default only people in your network, like your school, and your friends can see your profile), so I did not think it mattered too much. I thought about how annoying the interface was. I liked facebook, because its interface was uncluttered, among other things. Regardless of my personal reaction, the overwhelming reaction made by everyone will mean that these changes will be reverted quickly. I don't consider this story news really. Facebook isn't trying to mess with people's rights here or anything like that. They tried a new system out, which has clearly failed, and they will have to rethink it. Facebook makes its money off of ads. If people are afraid to use the system, they won't have a business. Simple as that. Nothing to worry about here. Everything will be back to normal soon...
I actually "ragequit" Facebook today.
These changes are stupid. They make the site's appearance less attractive, and announce information that really shouldn't be announced. Do I care that my friend removed "running" from his Interests? Not really.
To shit me even more, when I went to add other people as admins in groups I own, I kept getting an error stating that the group had more than 25 admins. Unfortunately, this was not correct, as I was the only admin in a large number of groups.
I thought Facebook was a great idea, but I will no longer use it.
Registered Linux user #421033
This is totally taking the psuedo-privacy away from facebook. Now I everyone is going to know who I'm flirting with because of the wall posts. Time to move to the facebook messages all the time, but I don't get the e-mails for those, so now I have to log-in to facebook even more. But yeah, THis feed is mad stalkerish. Though, I did find out from it that one of my friends got engaged. That was a shocker.
BTW Steve Irwin Rocks Hard!
-Ed
So you see what had happened was....
I think a big point is being missed. The issue isn't the fact that the data is public, it's that the data being brodcast on everyone else's home page. If I change my status to "single", I am happy having that information public, but I do not want it on every facebook friend's homepage. They are welcome to the information, I am providing it, they can see my public relationship status. I just don't want it sent TO them, I want it posted on my profile. This is akin to telling people you have broken up when they ask, versus telling everyone you have ever met regardless of if they ask or not. Or wearing a wedding ring versus running around shouting you are maried. Most of us KNOW the information is public and are happy with that. And the idea of broadcasting information to people that want to see it is a good one, but people should have control.
I don't use facebook, and therefore I have no personal opinion about the changes being good or bad. But I think the real issue is that thousands of users took to using facebook because they liked the way it looked and worked. Then overnight it's a lot different from what they expected, wanted, and signed up for. Because the owners are arrogant and stupid.
Maybe they'll learn something about running a business. We'll see. They'd better learn fast. I reckon facebook users can switch to myspace in about 15 minutes.
This reminds me of the 3 months I spent researching, trying, and evaluating online banks. I decided on E*Trade because I liked their interface the best. And sure enough, less than 6 months later, they did complete interface overhaul (New! Improved! Blecchh). To the worst I'd ever seen. It was obviously some web geeks's fun with the latest and greatest web bells and whistles. Fortunately, after two more overhauls (and several years), it is back into pretty decent shape. The difference was, it's harder to switch banks than social networking sites.
Most people don't even think inside the box.
Like an NP-Complete problem "facebook stalking" used to an endeavour that required tremendous amounts of time to accomplish. The recent introduction of a pervasive "Feed" section throughout the entire facebook architecture and layout turns the once unfeasible task of facebook stalking into an quick and easy task. Facebook's primary "security method" came not from its encrypted passwords, virtual communities of friends and protected personal information but from the simple fact that with its massive amount of information and every users massive connectivity throughout the overall network it was virtually impossible but not intractable to track the day-to-day activities of an single user. The "Feed" section totally demolishes this previously built-in security measure...turning what could of taken a potential "stalker" or "facebook abuser" hours, if not days to do, into seconds. In the end of the day what really matters is who wins in such a situation, and sadly in this case there is a clear and definte winner-the Facebook Team. With the recent changes they have gathered an enormous amount of publicity for their website and/or network. Additionally, they are relatively safe from losing a large number of users because since its inception almost two years ago Facebook has come to be an integral part of high school students, college students and professional's social life. While alot of people are upset and granted they may complain and form groups. The Facebook team knows that at the end of the day you will still log on (I know I will) and click away checking to see what your best buds are up to or what they are doing this weekend or perhaps what your embrassing pictures might arise of you from the party last week. Perhaps maybe in the end we too win as well...maybe the next time we log on we might just be a little more aware of how far-reaching and public a few simple clicks of the mouse could be.
"people do not want to feel like they're being watched and monitored. It's human instinct"
/. have the balls and eloquence to simply state that fact.
I was wondering when I might see someone on
I don't see this basic human truth stated very often. In fact I honestly feel it's quite creepy the way some people
embrace giving up their private lives to complete strangers, though I suspect it's pathological, either loneliness,
fear or exhibitionist tendencies and a sign of immaturity.
People who have lived a bit learn to behave more cautiously.
There is such a thing as surveillence fatigue, you are right, normal people are not comfortable with it and there
are famous psychology studies that prove it. For the best insights talk to anybody who lived in the USSR before 1987,
and you will understand how people spent unusual amounts of energy creating layers of persona to fool authorities
while creating their own deeply ambiguous "private lives" they shared with family and trusted neighbors using
a kind of "secret language".
But then anyone with half a brain would realise Facebook is a site for "unlovable" EMO teenagers to gossip
and posting your life up there is *optional* right?
Technology like this does not bring people together, except the aforementioned angst ridden naive teenagers gushing
with enthusiasm to form group identities, for most of us it is divisive in a subtle way, adults should treat it with extreme caution.
Which is why it's beyond belief that they changed the dissemination rules without telling anybody, what the hell were they thinking?!
I suppose we will see many more stories like this over social networking sites mishandling or abusing client information before
people wise up to the issues.
I guess Facebook just learned the significance of the first derivative test.
=)
I'm not convinced. If I were engaged to a beautiful woman, I'd share my joy and tell everyone I knew, and probably quite a few strangers.
If it got broken off at the last second, I don't think the fact that I told the world I was engaged means that the world should automatically get a notice that she dumped me or whatever.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
I misread part of it. I thought it said scour porn, not pour scorn.
The largest group I've seen is "Students against Facebook News Feed (Official Petition to Facebook)." It had 30,000 members 2 hours ago. It's now almost 70,000. Fairly clear that a huge portion of facebook thinks this is a terrible idea.
Oh, and the creator of this is a CMU grad, and I happen to have a mutual friend with her. She's actually logged into her AIM SN, but I don't feel like messaging her.
Then don't mark off that you were dumped.
I will concede that it may be that, if she says you're not going out anymore, it takes it off and announces it. I have no idea. This is the consequence assumed responsibility of the user, however, when they put that information in a public space online. If you didn't want people to find out, you shouldn't have put it in a place where they could have.
Perhaps, assuming that this is a problem, face book can institute some level of privacy filtering, i.e. not announcing changes/losses in friendship.
-dave
http://millionnumbers.com/ - own the number of your dreams
Your SSN is fair game for companies to trade without your consent, but a mp3 isn't.
Go figure.
We need a DMCA for personal information. But that won't happen as long as the Corporate State and its Republican lackeys are running the show.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
You seem to have an obsession about this topic, posting essentially the same message in thread after thread. The fact is most poeple see a distinction between posting information in their profiles to be seen by anyone who cares to look and broadcasting the "deltas" or changes they make in a Wikipedia-changelog-like fashion.
Clearly you see no such distinction. Obviously, a sufficiently motivated monitor could discover the exact same data by running an automated polling script and monitoring for changes. However, doing that on your friends' social networking pages can best be described as a "creepy" activity for stalkers.
The fact that they have now built this creepy stalking feature into Facebook is what people are reacting to.
It's not that the information wasn't already public, it's just that this feature makes what would normally be considered an anti-social, obsessive level of interest in your friends (using an automated script to monitor somebody's social networking site for every little change) and renders it a trivial matter of looking at your mini-feed.
The fact that you are the only person who doesn't see the difference here should indicate to you that perhaps you are missing something on a social level, and that most people don't see this as an information-theoretic problem.
More concisely, the opposition is to the automation of this data aggregation. This is the essence of a lot of opposition to increased data collection and sharing by various entities; it's not the mere fact of collection, but the reduction in cost to the point that massive correlation and reference can be done and justified for almost anyone.
Yes, the information is public. I have never I posted anyone online about myself that I would care if everyone knew. On the other hand, Facebook now publically displays changes in information. Previously, only the current version of someone's profile was visible on Facebook. Now, if something is changed, then the current version and what was changed is visible. As a simple example, if someone removes "Seinfeld" from their list of favorite TV shows, then it is publically announced to all of their friends, even though "Seinfeld" no longer appears in their current profile. No one cares about announcements of favorite TV shows, but this is a change which adds to the amount of information visible on facebook.com, not just a new interface for that information.
Centralization breaks the internet.
I thought i was the only one freaking out. I am thinking about deleting my facebook account.
What facebook people dont understand is the word "friend" doesnt mean you like the person, or even want to talk to the person. It just means if you met them on the street you would say HI.
Damn man why dont you just put a damn camera on me and allow everyone to see what I do.
Idiots
Obviously, everything you do on Facebook is available to be seen. Why would I do something on a social network that no one could see (with the possible exception of Notes). Technically, then, everything you do on Facebook is public, or available. What Facebook has now done is made everything accessible--no, unavoidable. This didn't use to be the case. Before the switch, I could go to one of the 50 groups I belong to, pick one of the 10 discussions in that group, and post a reply. The only way someone would find it is if they were 1) looking at my profile, and were 2) scrolling through all my groups, and were 3) scrolling through all the discussions in each group, and were 4) reading through all the posts in each discussion. Was my post available? Yeah. But it was essentially inaccessible. The only way you would have found that I did that was if you were interested in that group, and if that's the case, then I want you to read it! What I don't want is my idle typing broadcasted to someone I just met yesterday. The problem with Facebook isn't that it's made private information public, it's that sectored information is now global. Whenever you write something, you consider your audience. Wall posts belong on my friend's wall, group discussions belong in that group, profile changes belong to my profile. The change has meant that these previously sectioned off sources of information are thrown at everyone I know. Now, I feel like when I'm writing on someone's wall, I need to include a background sentence or two to make sure that my 200 friends reading the comment understand what I mean. Please Facebook, let me find information about my friends on my own.
It's the difference between passive and active spreading of information.
You know how you clip funny cartoons out and stick them on your cubicle wall, if you have an office job? Suddenly, little elves are sneaking around and Xeeroxing those cartoons and handing them out to every single one of your friends. You didn't want them to see it that badly. But the elves think it's of incredible importance, and everyone needs to know you got a chuckle out of that Dilbert with the joke about the obnoxious co-worker having toilet problems the instant they get to the office!
egypt urnash minimal art.
What people seem to be most upset about is that somewhat random people can read up about you. But that only works if you let random people be your "friends" on facebook. This provides some disincentives for people to just add tons of people as friends. Maybe there needs to be two tiers of contacts - associates and friends. With friends you get the feeds and updates, and you don't with associates (and they don't get yours). Cries of privacy violation are a bit much - facebook is a public forum. What you put online is your responsibility. If you don't want people to know you broke up with your partner, then don't provide that information at all on facebook.
At best, it sounds like people want finer-grained access control. The feeds simply exposed the underlying problem, rather than creating a problem.
This is one of the reasons I don't join any of the popular social networking sites, because they're all about putting every piece of information out in public. Who my friends are, what comments they've left me, etc. It's fun when you're just goofing around, but when you have actual friends and groups of friends you'd like to keep quiet, this doesn't work anymore.
vBuddy.com is the only one I'd visit, because they actually let you group your friends into separate groups, and assign permissions to what they can see and do.
eTrade SUCKS
A change from "in a relationship with so-and-so" to anything else (except, I assume, "in an open relationship with so-and-so") is interpreted as "broke up with so-and-so", even if it is simply a change to not display any relationship status.
Centralization breaks the internet.
Wait.... Facebook let high school students join? Excuse me? Thats why we had Myspace and if you didn't want to participate in 16 year olds breaking new ground in sexual harassment, you could join Facebook. Facebook fell on its own sword by its own damn self.
Why are they trying to become Myspace? Sure, they'll have more users and make more money off banner ads that way, but then they gotta put up with Myspace-like problems. When a rich white girl disappears, you'll see a few minutes on Fox News about the alleged piss poor moral credit score of Myspace (if not outright bankruptcy!). Facebook was the golden boy if it was ever mentioned.
So they flip off our entire userbase and hope that myspace's millions of users will want to create ANOTHER profile and REBUILD their network of friends for no good reason at all!
And in case myspace and facebook (or their sponsors) haven't woken up and smelled the coffee, social networking is over with. This is no longer a new frontier, revolutionary idea, or any better of marketing scheme/data mine than it was two years ago. Users' social networks are firmly in place, most myspace profiles are blank or ridicuously oblique and ultimately uninviting. Tila Tequila and Christine Dolce got their Maxim shoots or makeup deals or whatever. It's over.
*drops microphone*
Bart the Play-dude episode:
"Some men like a challenge -- not me."
Seriously though, am I the only one that never visited Facebook or Myspace or whatever the fuck the most recent fad-site is?
Facebook has a feature where you can schedule an event and invite your friends. The college student's version of Outlook meeting requests. People that are going can see who else is going, though it now announces all that data to those people's entire 'social network' whether they requested it or not. This was done retroactively, as well, suddenly making very public knowledge of past occurances. This feed thing is showing me lists of friends that went to recent events. Here's a quote from that page:
"6 of your friends are attending Queer Television Awards 2006: LGBTQ Welcome Assembly."
I can click that link and it quickly tells me who those people are. Needless to say, I'm disturbed! All I do is log in, and it's showing me pictures that people have recently uploaded from the crazy parties they were at over the weekend. Sure they put them online so they didn't assume any privacy, but why the hell am I shown this? A lot of these people are just people I've met around campus and they can be my 'facebook friend', and I would otherwise be respecting a certain level of privacy if these things weren't put on my main page by facebook.
Maybe I'm disturbed because it makes me feel like a stalker?
//TODO: signature
It's all pieces of a puzzle that leaves me feeling just a little too exposed.
Here's the question you should be asking yourself:
Since all this information is public on facebook, is it better that facebook provide the "big brother" tools to everyone, or is it better that someone else put together the equivalent "big brother" tools?
Either way you are just as vulnerable, just when facebook provides the tools everyone is made aware that they are vulnerable, when someone else puts the tools together and publishes them on his own website the only the people looking to make trouble will learn just how vulnerable you are.
So which is it? Ignorance or knowledge, you get to choose.
But the one choice people seem to want - to be protected from such tools is not an option. At least not if they want to use facebook.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
It's the implementation. As I posted at http://kettering.facebook.com/group.php?gid=220828 8769, I wouldn't have a problem with the news feeds IF:
1) It wasn't automatic. IF it had merely been a feature that you could "turn on" it would have been ok.
2) It could be turned off. IF I could decide that I didn't want anyone to see my actions, it would have been fine.
3) It was flexible. IF I could decide exactly WHICH actions I wanted others to see (not by clicking the X in the mini-feed, that's a terrible way to censor, plus there is debate that it even works), and WHO I wanted to see them, I wouldn't have much of a problem with it. Similarly, if I could decide exactly what information I wanted to see on MY feed, it could have been far far far less cluttered.
As it stands, this is the worst Facebook upgrade ever, and will be subject to an imminent self-destruction (how do you think everyone who has joined the posted group so far found out about it? that's right, the News Feeds).
Also, the group I linked to is amazing. It is growing at nearly 1,000 members per minute. In a single day it has garnered one tenth the support of "The Largest Facebook Group Ever". Shows what happens when you ruin their beloved social networking site.
Security through obscurity will be the death of us...
It's actually a good thing for Facebook to do this, especially for college kids, since it does teach them about the need for privacy when dealing with the public internet. I hope they keep this feature, since it will help these kids to be more aware of the fact that, yes, data is public on the internet, and that this information is actually pretty easily accessible to ACTUAL stalkers/spammers/scammers/etc..
I'm more concerned that these new additions look like TRASH. I like Facebook because it was clean and uniform; I could easily find what I was looking for on a page. This new junk is too much...even the shrinking sections in my profile. It's too much junk, I was fine with my whole profile showing. They even had to rearrange everything!
There goes $750 million down the toilet. Can you hear it?
Limited profile.
Help page motherfucker, do you read it?
I pretend to know more than I really do by mooching off google and wikipedia.
And guess what 'MankyD'? You would have earned no call-out from me if /. didn't have a feature where I can see the last 24 of your posts, all of which say the same thing.
Which may just prove the point at long last. Having a list of your seven posts all in one spot made it truly easy for me to become annoyed with you, whereas if that feature did not exist, you could've gone to bed thinking you were right, as chances are good I wouldn't have gone to the trouble of 'investigating'.
Of course, you could have NOT PUT THE INFORMATION ON A PUBLIC WEBSITE too.
sigh.
All the privacy concerns are all probably moot anyway.
You just don't get it. Nobody is claiming to have lost any privacy they once had, but rather a sense of privacy. We all know we're putting personal information online, and we all know it's public and available to anyone in our friend network. But it at least felt intimate before this. It's the feel of the website, the sense of community, that has been altered. And people don't like it.
Don't misinterpret "we want our old Facebook back" as "we want our privacy back". It's not the same thing.
Am I the only one who read that as "scour porn?"
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
The biggest group protesting it has almost 100,000 users in a day. Some guy calculated it peaked around 20 users a second earlier:
o k
http://encyclopediadramatica.com/index.php/Facebo
I don't really care what people see about me on Facebook. I'm well aware of the privacy issues.
However, I can see some reasons why people would be concerned.
My biggest concern is that there are plenty of things on Facebook that I can choose to opt out of. I can choose who can see my photos, who can see my online status, who can see my wall, and plenty of other options. I don't see any option to hide or opt out of the log of my events being posted on my profile page. I am very capable of manually deleting events, but in order to fit the privacy scheme of the rest of the site, I should have the ability to opt out altogether if I so choose.
I certainly don't care that someone can see that I insulted the Saint Louis Cardinals on some girl's wall or that I joined a group for Royals fans. But I do believe that the privacy options on this feature are inconsistent with the options available for other features around the site.
No, facebook/internet is like a book...unless a book is opened to page X where such information is contained, whether that information existsted within that book is irrelevent. Books...with pages...internet...with pages... I mean the analogue continues... In any case, I am fully aware that anything I write on my facebook account is public information, however I dont like the idea of a page that is "tracking changes." The changes are different than the information..its a derivative of the information...and that derivation, the extra step taken by facebook, of making feeds is what bothers me, not issues around my privacy. I think feeds need to refine what information it displays...I feel like when someone puts a NOTE up on facebook, and it shows up on the feed, that is really really useful...but I am not a fan oh so and so left this group or so and so became friends with whoever...
If you want people to find it out from you personally at your own pace, THEN DON'T POST IT TO FACEBOOK.
Jesus Christ...
People keep saying that if you don't want your recent activity to be displayed, you can delete it. While this is true for the feed on your own profile, this is NOT true for the main feed that everyone sees on their home page. I deleted all the "stories" in my mini-feed, but my friend could still see my activity on his home page. Although I think facebook may be onto a good idea with feeds, the lack of control over my own information that Facebook provides me is disturbing. Right now everyone's info is flying around like it's like the Wild West.
Sorry, some of us just skim through and don't read entire threads before posting (like me).
I still think your original point is right. I do agree with what MankyD said: If you don't want someone to know about your relationship status, don't put it online. *HOWEVER*, there is still a difference, both subjectively and objectively, between "not privite" and "announced." For example, there is a difference between posting to a blog or LiveJournal (or, up until now, facebook) and emailing or messaging everyone in your address book (or all your Facebook friends, or whatever). For the former, any damn person can still see what you said/did/posted. For the latter, every person gets a specific notification. Yes, there are similarities, and YES, if you don't want anyone knowing about whatever you should not post it. But in one situation you had to actively seek the knowledge, in the other it was presented whether you would have cared or not. Even if you (plural, in general, not you, BusDriver) don't have a problem with the changes I don't see how you simply can't understand why someone else might.
As someone posted elsewhere in the thread, formerly Facebook did X and Y (doesn't matter what X and Y specifically are). Now, without asking, Facebook does X, Y, and Z. It's irrelevant if Y and Z are similar, or if Z just made Y more public. People weren't expecting Z and are allowed to dislike Z. I don't see how someone could argue otherwise.
-Trillian
Dave, you are a voice of reason among many fools. That's all I have to say. It might not pass the filter about how many characters, though, comments have to be, and I don't know that it'll pass the time barrier, either. Commenting on slashdot sure sucks. There's all these boners that are upset that facebook tells people that they have added as friends about changes to their relationship status and what music they like.
Actually, funny story: I asked a colleague of mine at KUOI if he'd heard of the Silversun Pickups, an indie rock act. He said he thought he heard their album and liked it OK. Later I see on facebook that he added them as an interest. Ha ha, what a tool.
I'm on a road shaped like a figure eight; I'm going nowhere but I'm guaranteed to be late.
I guess you can take this as your first life lesson at college. Do not post anything to any website that directly links back to you that you wouldn't want your mother, your father, a future employer, the police, a potential girl/(guy?) you don't even know yet, your children, etc. to read. Even posting to sites that INDIRECTLY link back to you can be sketchy. I learned this back in like 7th grade, it seemed like common sense to me at the time.
Assume that anything posted to the internet is both permanent and broadcast to everyone on earth.
If anything, you should be THANKING facebook for making it more obvious what exactly you idiots have been making public knowledge.
I think that this will lead to a better understanding among facebook users that the info they put on there really is public. This should discourage people from placing things they don't want random people to know on that site.
I don't use facebook much, but this feature helps me know what's been going on since I've visited, so I love it.
Dude you werent really wrong, the thing is you conceded that your relationship status was a private matter, so it sort of is outside the scope of this discussion. The question was if there was a different between public information and pubicly announced information...and you were right on that point.
PEOPLE DON'T LIKE IT. That's really all that matters. Either Facebook can listen to a little more than their market droids before making such lame changes, or face the consequences.
Well, it is no "big surprise" people are up in arms about this. They've suddenly become conscious of all the data people can easily mine out of their facebook profiles. Before this it all seemed innocent enough. Simple enough though, don't post what you don't want others to know
"[...]that most people don't see this as an information-theoretic problem." GODDAMN EXACTLY!
I think the real issue is that the changes create a very self-conscious atmosphere on the facebook, where I must consider my every move because all my friends will be immediately notified of it. When you're in a room of people socializing (perhaps a difficult position for many on ./ ), everyone can hear each other, and that's fine. But you wouldn't want every person in the room to hear every word you say to each person?
David Hasselhoff having trouble getting a membership...
All the news feed does is tell you changes you have permission to see anyway. I don't consider website functionality that I could reproduce with a perl script to be particularly invasive.
"Stalking is supposed to be hard."
You're assuming anybody worth stalking uses Facebook.
I think this whole thing is just kind of funny.
Is it really too much not to expect a link to the site in question in a story about that site? Sheesh.
qntm.org
Yes i agree the information is out there on facebook about relationship status, but there is a BIG DIFFERENCE between removing that you "are in a relationship with..." an individual on YOUR facebook profile, versus having "x broke up with y today!" on EVERYONES facebook home pages. thats just disrespectful to the two individuals.
So why should you put it up on a public website? There is no difference. None. End of story.
That is so not even *close* to the end of the story. You are creating a false dichotomy here, as if the only property of any piece of information is a binary "public" versus "not public" flag. (And, for the sake of this discussion, "public" means "visible only to people at your university and to people you have friended at other universities".) There may be no difference in principle between two delivery methods for a given datum, but there can be large practical differences -- which this is an example of -- as well as differences in perception based on those deliveries.
If you have ever used any sort of aggregation service, such as an RSS reader, a Livejournal friendslist, etc., then you should be aware of the difference this kind of feature makes. This is not a question of whether the information is "out there" or not, but a question of which information is available by which different methods. My web-reading habits became vastly different than they had been once I started using Google Reader. It has made a huge impact on my online experience, and yet all it does is collect information that was out there anyway.
Your claim that there is "no difference" between different methods of delivering the same information is ridiculous. Human beings are not fully rational. How you tell somebody something has an impact on how they receive it. How you tell somebody something about a third person affects how that third person feels about you spreading it around. There are differences in tone, timing, forcefulness, etc., all of which affect one's reaction to incoming (or outgoing) information. These factors are especially important when it comes to information that is of a personal nature. Facebook previously had a certain standard for how information was available, and have suddenly changed that standard in a drastic way that many users find distasteful and crass.
I'm not saying that Facebook shouldn't be "allowed" to make this change. They can do whatever the fuck they want. I'm not saying it's a great injustice. If they stick with this new feature, then obviously the people who don't like it can either stop using the site or at the very least stop posting some sorts of information. But it's perfectly reasonable for users to prefer things the way they were, and to wish the system to be changed back. It's not crazy that a user might *want* to have their relationship status listed, but not want changes in that status immediately broadcast to all of their acquaintances. If users want the site to operate in a certain way and not in other ways... then it should operate in the way they want it to.
this is like the difference between having a blog, and e-mailing your blog to everybody on your e-mail address list.
Keep in mind there's another function of this. By setting your status to "single" you are broadcasting yourself as "available," whether it be for random play or serious relationships. What college student is going to turn down a chance to get laid for some so-called "privacy"?
Public Records are public and more and more becoming available on the internet for free. I'm not talking about sites that you pay for them to get the info. I'm talking about circuit court government sites like http://wcca.wicourts.gov/index.xsl With a last name and a first initial, I can look for DUI's, speeding tickets, divorces, filing of wills and anything else that would end up in court.
The new facebook is in serious need of three things:
9 52
1. The ability to control what news appears on your homepage
2. The ability to control which friends can see your news
3. A less-ugly layout
That'll take care of the information-overload and stalking-too-easy complaints.
With those fixed, it's actually a really interesting feature. It nicely supplants certain blogs--I'm thinking the 'today I went to the doctor's then I broke up with my boyfriend lol" variety--making it really easy to keep tabs on the few close friends whose lives you really ARE interested in. I think it's an improvement.
If you're a facebook member and want to join the fun:
http://harvard.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2208093
Remember, remember the fifth of September.
The news feed chaos and rot
I see no reason why the news feed chaos
Should ever be forgot
Mark Zuck' twas his intent
To show our lives without consent
Code was changed deep below
To put our lives out for show
Such things are stalker's delight
So to media our story we tell
Tell them, tell them, imagine stalkers this'll bring
Tell them, tell them, we'll never stand for such a thing
Before this was enacted, in order to obtain the same detailed information, you would have needed a very complex stalkbot that spidered facebook constantly. Now, it's all there for you. Doing such a task manually would have been a full-time job.
I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
This whole uproar is making me grin ear to ear.
Why the hell would people want to claim FIVEHUNDREDEIGHTYFOUR friends, and boast of that number.
Get some real friends morons, go have a social life or a hobby/sport (maybe even both god forbid) instead of putting so much effort into putting your absent social life and hobbies on the web.
And now start crying when it turns out that all the blabla you have done on facebook turns out to be actually visible to the other facebook morons, which is precisely the reason why you put it there anyway.
Get a life
Bart
I have posted nothing on my Facebook that I regret. I list my favorite shows (love Whedon) and music (Johnny Cash, Broadway, Alternative rock), plus the fact that I'm single, and when I go out I post that as a status update. (Like an away message for Facebook.) The pictures I post are from vacations or parties my friends I have, we don't drink, or have random sexual encounters (that we post pictures of, anyways.)
The simple fact is that while I have no problem listing this information, I don't want it being tracked after it's removed. I don't mind a status message saying what I'm doing at the moment, but I don't like them having a record of what I did for the last month. The information is clearly available and anyone with a program written from the Facebook API or a really good memory could have the same list. But making it right there available to the lowest common denominator that might be looking at it makes me uncomfortable.
I make that information available because Facebook is a useful tool, people from my classes or hall can browse based on interests or friends, and it's nice to be able to have that available to more people. It allows you to find things out about people that you might not garner from a casual first conversation, and for these people I want the information to be there. The only people who can view my profile are people that attend my University, or people that I accept as friends. Considering the fact that there are over 50,000 people in my university network though, I am not comfortable with them keeping all these records. I want to leave it open to potentional friends that I make through the Facebook, but don't necessarily to want people I've just met to have access to every comment or bulletin board post I've made. So Facebook is a useful tool, and I choose to use it knowing the risks of stalkers and the like. It's just that I don't want the company itself to be exposing and then supporting one of the features of Facebook that I was wary of before.
I know, that sounds hypocritical and irrenconciable, wanting the public information to be public, but it's simply different degrees of privacy. And I was happy with the Facebook the way it was before. If anyone really needs to know all that stuff about me, if they really think it's worth it, they can code their own aggregator or find one to download. Frankly, most (or at least many) people on Facebook aren't intelligent enough to do that. This simply makes it a lot easier to get that information, and again, as I said, I don't like this tracking feature. It just feels like you're being watched and makes you a lot more reticent to do simple things like make a bulletin board post about an issue I find important but that I might not want all my friends reading.
For example, there's a feature on Facebook where you can give support to certain campaign issues for the upcoming election. I do support certain political candidates, and I would like to express that, but what if my new roommate that I haven't met yet happens to disagree with this certain controversial candidate? I can't leave a comment on the candidates "Wall" unless I sign up to show my support, and I do want to show my support, but on the other hand I don't want it to be advertised to all my friends on the "News Feed" prominently displayed in my profile. It's not that I'm afraid to voice my opinion, I'm afraid of offending people before I have a chance to make friends with them. It's a subtle thing, but it makes a difference in first impressions. People can be sensitive about those issues, even good people I'm socially compatible with. I don't want that to be their first impression of me, that we disagree on one topic, despite the other hundred things we have in common.
So alas, I decided not to endorse this candidate on Facebook, though I would have liked to. It's one thing to have to go to a special page to see my endorsements, it's another to have it as a timestamped bulletin on my main page.
So, in conclusion, it's simply human nature to not want to have all of your friends given an easy way to track all of your activity. I don't mind the information being their, it's just a psychological thing, knowing that what you do is recorded on your main page with a neat little time stamp.
This is a reply facebook have been sending out to people had you moaned at them about these new changes.
Hey,
We understand that some people are unhappy or
concerned about the recent changes to Facebook.
Your feedback is welcome and appreciated because our
goal is to make a website that is in line with our
users' expectations. As we consider future changes
and modifications, we will certainly keep everyone's
opinions in mind. We think, however, that once you
become familiar with the new layout and features,
you will find these changes just as useful as past
improvements such as Photos, Groups, and the Wall.
We introduced News Feed and Mini-Feed because we
wanted to make it easier than ever before to see
interesting, relevant pieces of information from the
world around you. News Feed automatically generates
the most recent news stories about your friends so
that you have a resource available to guide your
movement throughout the site. Mini-Feed allows you
to quickly and easily see the latest developments in
the lives of people whose profiles you choose to
visit.
What is important to remember with all of these
features is that we are not allowing anyone to see
anything that they wouldn't normally be allowed to
see. For example, if you join a secret group, any
friends that are not members will not receive a News
Feed story about this action. Similarly, when they
look at your Mini-Feed, they will not be able to see
a story about you joining the group. The settings
that are established on the My Privacy page and the
settings that apply to Photo albums, Notes, Groups,
Events, etc. dictate the stories that are displayed
in News Feed and Mini-Feed. Although there is no
option to completely turn off Mini-Feed, all users
have the option to hide individual stories. If you
select the 'X' button to the right of any of your
own stories, that content will no longer be visible
to anyone viewing your Mini-Feed. Facebook prides
itself in giving users complete control over the
information that they share with others. Let us
know if you have any questions about the privacy
settings that we offer.
Thanks for using Facebook!
--
Customer Support Representative
Facebook
today is an ex's birthday.
i want to wish her. in the past i would not have hesitated to write a short and sweet note on her wall. since we now live halfway across the world from each other, a phone call is unreasonably complicated (especially given our acrimonious breakup). an email is too personal (i don't really want her to respond). so the wall is an ideal private/public combo. A personalized message in a public setting.
unfortunately, the new facebook *news feed* would, without my explicit permission, broadcast my post to EVERYONE we know in common, along with the ENTIRE TEXT. At least half of them would have a chuckle at my expense, or at least that's the way I feel. So, before posting, I hesitate. And send an email instead.
Facebook has lost a significant utility for me. Similar public/private conundrums are going to result when somebody invites me to RSVP for a party via Facebook, wants me to join a group, etc. Updating my profile is now difficult because each change i make will be publicly broadcast to all my Facebook "friends" (some of whom I don't even know). And I don't want that.
The illusion of privacy that facebook gave -- that it was a reasonably intimate network of peers -- is now destroyed.
shooting is not too good for my enemies
All you kids take this shit too seriously. It's just a website. So is that stupid myspace crap. People are always updating their profiles and shit as if anybody else cares about your profile. The extent of this crap when I was in school was a damn IM profile that said some dumb quotes or something and maybe a link or two to some websites. Now you guys go make these unsightly websites and add your 'friends' to your list and crap. Call me a troll but you people need to get a life outside of the Internet. Those people are not your friends. If you don't want people to know something about you DON'T PUT IT ON THE INTERNET. It's that god damned simple.
nothing
"That's what I would consider the rational response because there is no way in hell *I* would have ever signed up in the first place since I already knew just how much such social-networking systems are the antithesis to personal privacy."
Being social has always been the antithesis of privacy.*
*Think about it for a minute.
You're both right, of course, people don't like it so they'll change it (likely ... add filtering rather than eliminate it entirely). And it is completely irrational for people to dislike it as well.
All this incident really proves is that social software is really hard, because software is the epitome of rationality whereas social relationships aren't. Better luck next time Facebook ... you're still better than the competition.
Question is how much feedback will it take for them to make changes .... given that people complain whenever stuff changes. IT's like the first law of software or something.
Oh, this is nothing new. I co-authored a paper about this subject back in December of 2005 discussing many of these same issues, it's just that they have now been brought to the forefront.
f all05-papers/student-papers.html
http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/6.805/student-papers/
-jsoltren
The End.
For a corporate profile for Facebook please visit this link: http://techaddress.wordpress.com/2006/09/05/profil e-facebook/ It seems to be that maybe Facebook needs to higher a more formal quality assurance and marketing team. When you are changing features on millions of users maybe you should ask their opinion first, not assume you know what's best and make the changes anyway.
That guy at the club will probably notice faster than your friends.
Okay, I will shamefully admit that I had a MySpace account for all of three months. I had a problem with a stalker when I was in college, and still to this day have to redirect him from my Web site, and since I can't redirect people from MySpace like I can my personal blog, I deleted my MySpace account. Simple.
If you are that concerned, remove your content, or don't publish information that you don't want people to know. Simple.
Nothing is stopping Facebook's users from removing their profiles, or removing certain snippits of content, that is wholly up to the user. If the user is that concerned about stalking, then they should make the necessary changes and take subsequent percautions.
Perhaps calling your friends after a break-up and telling them is a better idea than posting it on a Web site, especially if you are concerned about the ramifications of random people knowing you're single.
This reminds me of the uproar when dejanews first appeared on the scene. All these people who had made public posts to usenet under a mistaken belief that what they said would never go beyond the little "community" of that group were very unhappy to see all of there messages in a searchable database.
That's an exceedingly analogous situation, and that's exactly what I thought too. When dejanews showed up, I thought it was lame and no one would use their www version when compared to the power of the full-blown client newsreaders; then a few years ago I saw the search facilities in Google Groups and saw my entire posting history going back to when I was *16*. By now every one of those posts is so old no one will care (plus I never learned Elvish or wrote posts on sex), but I got the point: I now use Usenet only very sparingly and only in a very professional manner on the assumption that any employer may see it years down the road. I also cut back a lot on Slashdot when I saw how many sites out there blatantly rip threads and get them into the search engines.
I didn't use Facebook much, but I liked the fact that people in my classes could at least see who I was, note that I was happily married, and maybe notice a blurb about a great job opportunity with a cool group I had worked with recently. But now my Facebook account is deactivated and will stay that way even if they turn off (or allow users to tune) the "news feed" and "mini-feed" functions.
More than anything, the Facebook team has shown me that they are both capable and willing to implement a historical profile auditing function which spits in the face of social norms. We do not post lists on people's doors that include the contents of their grocery carts over the last six months, and we do not email photographs of every post-it note that appears on a whiteboard to a list of fifty people. Online, we expect personal profiles to be current only, to be "live", not to track their own changes and provide search features on deleted information, even if third parties such as the Wayback Machine and Google Cache might sometimes be able to do it.
My web-reading habits became vastly different than they had been once I started using Google Reader. It has made a huge impact on my online experience, and yet all it does is collect information that was out there anyway.
This truth is the basis of why you are completely wrong.
Your method of accessing the information changed, but the information itself did not change and neither has anyone else's method of accessing the information.
Prior to facebook making this change, all this information was out there and could be accessed in a similar fashion, it just required 3rd party tools. You were ignorant of way other people could collect the information, now you are not. It's the exact equivalent of google coming along and providing google reader, except instead of just mentioning it in a press release, facebook built their version of "google reader" right into their user interface.
Personally, I think it is a bad business decision because people like to be ignorant, they don't like being made to realize that the world is not as safe and secure as they imagined.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Meh, I like the new facebook changes. I hope they stay.
Nathan Friedly
They already have controls on who can or cannot view your profile. All they need to do is extend this 'privacy' setting to your outgoing news feed items. With just a small tweak everyone could get their illusion of privacy again.
Simple:
1) Tag each news feed item. ( 'About Me Edit', 'Wall Post', 'Picture Change', etc.)
2) Add a form to the profile settings to let you choose which items you want to allow to be sent to other people's news feeds.
3) Now, extend that and let people filter their incoming news feeds.
4) Make everyone happy.
5) ???
6) Profit.
I personally like the news feed. I don't stalk my friend's profiles very finely so I miss 99% of the changes anyone makes. The news feed compiles all of the information into one neat list for me to review when I login. It would be nice to be able to filter the information a bit though.
Actually, the wall posting would only be broadcast to people who are friends with both parties. If it weren't, then Facebook would be violating the users' privacy settings.
Less than 12 hours after I saw the changes to Facebook, I deactivated my account. I admit that I keep a myspace account, and up until yesterday I had a facebook account. I publish almost no personal information on either of these accounts, and the personal information they did require was faked. Myspace thinks I am a 79 year old woman, for example.
I keep these accounts simply so that friends of mine can find me and get in touch with me.
So what did I have to fear from facebook? After all, I almost never did anything "active" on facebook, meaning my name would almost never show up in other people's feeds. What bothered me was the access I had to OTHER people. I really had no desire to know that much about my friends. True, I could probably turn it off somehow, but it really bothered me.
I know human nature all too well. I would like to think I would be above it, but I know that I would log in daily and scan down through the news feed. I did not want to do that, and so I eliminated the temptation.
I do not agree with the people saying "Well, if you do not want everyone to know about it, do not put it online in the first place." My trash might be public once I put it on the street, but that does not mean I want a service to email all my friends with a complete listing of the contents of my trash bag each week.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
As of last night, the largest groups were 150k+ members, but I'm confident that's grown again. The 10k listed in the article is pitifully low.
One thing that most people here don't seem to get: There's a difference between public information, and publicly announced information. Yes you can click the stupid little X, but there needs to be an option to totally disable the Mini Feed, and never have it post any of your information ever again. Right now it's really damned time consuming for having to delete, ONE BY ONE, the things you're done the past few months. Most of the older slashdotters don't seem to "get it". Yeah, it's public, but I nor most other Facebookers want this info SCREAMED out at everyone. -Dash
I'm going to get out of this place alive, even if it kills me!
I don't see a problem... I am on Facebook and I just hide the events in my News Feed. Everyone can just select to hide the event. /shrug
I'm just curious, but did anyone at Facebook think about how they're going to be losing ad revenue from this? If everyone can get all the information on one page (the page you get at immediately when you login), pageviews will drop dramatically. That doesn't sound like a winning business plan, especially when everyone hates it as is. The largest group I can find against it is at 170,000, with 25k on the petiononline petition.
PEOPLE DON'T LIKE IT. That's really all that matters.
TOUGH SHIT. That's all that really matters. Life's full of crap you won't like. Sadly, they seem to have dropped Reality 101 from most college curriculums.
Here's a tip:
Learn to cope.
Yes, the new feature is exactly like incorporating a feed reader, which is of course why I made that comparison. However, the purpose of Facebook -- or at least the purpose most users have for it -- is not to provide them and their acquaintances with instantaneous updates about each other's activities. It is a tool for social networking. A way of keeping in touch with your friends that is built in most ways like an extension of real life, not a replacement of real life with completely different features. When the features of the site get too far away from the ways in which information is shared in meatspace, people get uneasy because it's not the sort of social interaction that they have been living with for 20 years.
If my method of accessing the information changes, that *does* affect the other users, because it is *their* information. They are used to that information being delivered in certain ways based on the system that Facebook had set up. Because people care about the way information about them is presented, changing that system is going to upset people.
It doesn't matter *at all* that the information was already there. Everybody knows that the information was already there. It's about the *ways* in which people prefer to share certain types of information. Previously it was a way that most users thought felt natural, and now many users no longer feel that way. Maybe they'll change their minds after getting used to it, and maybe not.
The fact that third party tools already existed to do this is also not important, unless use of those tools was pretty widespread to the point that "a lot" of people (whatever that means to any individual user) already had this aggregation going on. As long as those users were a pretty small minority, it would have a very small impact on most others' use of the site.
Anything on the Internet is Available Anywhere Anytime Always.
This is the first rule of using the Internet. Facebook is on the Internet. Therefore, anything on Facebook is Available Anywhere Anytime Always. Period.
I sympathize with users who haven't thought through this implication and are now shocked or offended by it. It does seem a little creepy and excessive. However, the nature of the Internet is complete and total public access. It offers a tremendous number of advantages as well as a number of disadvantages. Facebook users can filter their content and hope the filtering policy doesn't change, or they can leave Facebook. Or, they can self-censor the information they post to Facebook. But the only way to make sure that people never find information you don't want on the Internet is to never put it on the Internet in the first place.
There are hundreds of Usenet posts I wrote in the 1990's which I certainly would disavow today, and yet they will be on the Internet forever and there is nothing I can do about it. Today when I put information on the Internet -- including this very Slashdot post -- I am cognizant of the fact that I am using a public forum. I use a tone and writing style as if I am whispering into the ear of every human on the planet simultaneously.
Of course, there is also the possibility that a friend or acquaintance or even an enemy will put something on the Internet that you wished to keep hidden. It's a risk of our modern age. The Internet is fantastic, I consider it the greatest technological advancement in human history. But it is a double-edged sword. Facebook users are fortunate in a sense, now they know exactly how powerful and dangerous posting information on the Internet really is.
Regular Meta Moderators are not more likely to get mod points.
This whole news story is stupid.
Besides most of us can't even see what they are talking about because we don't have these facebook thingies. I hate social networking. It's like how people linkjack and shit to get people to visit their shitty blogs. I want the *NEWS story* or article, not how it relates to some dumbasses meaningless life.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
Wow, making the Department of Homeland Security feed a public feature.
Bold move.
.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
1. I don't like how about a week's worth of recent events were already on our newsfeeds before we had a chance to approve it.
2. I don't like how we don't have any control over what is automatically fed to our feed. We should be able to work through a series of checkboxes to determine what we do and do not want on our own mini-feed (while, of course, maintaining the ability to delete something from the feed).
3. Most annoying of all: I don't like how people are complaining about privacy issues when all the information in the feed is available only to those people who could already see it anyway! Not to mention, Facebook has fairly extensive privacy options (click the "My Privacy" link at left and look around) -- you can affect which friends see what according to what Facebook network they're on, and you can also set up your "Limited Profile" and limit what certain friends can see. But, seriously, if you don't want someone to see something you're doing on Facebook, then why are they on your friends list?
But I love the new features. Keeping track of updates people want me to see is now much easier!
I just hate how a great new feature has brought Facebook down to a mob mentality with an average IQ less than my shoe size.
Lol, consequences like what? They'll quit paying? Oh right, facebook is free.
This one's on their Facebook blog:
Calm down. Breathe. We hear you.
by Mark Zuckerberg, September 5
We've been getting a lot of feedback about Mini-Feed and News Feed. We think they are great products, but we know that many of you are not immediate fans, and have found them overwhelming and cluttered. Other people are concerned that non-friends can see too much about them. We are listening to all your suggestions about how to improve the product; it's brand new and still evolving.
We're not oblivious of the Facebook groups popping up about this (by the way, Ruchi is not the devil). And we agree, stalking isn't cool; but being able to know what's going on in your friends' lives is. This is information people used to dig for on a daily basis, nicely reorganized and summarized so people can learn about the people they care about. You don't miss the photo album about your friend's trip to Nepal. Maybe if your friends are all going to a party, you want to know so you can go too. Facebook is about real connections to actual friends, so the stories coming in are of interest to the people receiving them, since they are significant to the person creating them.
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.
We're going to continue to improve Facebook, and we want you to be part of that process. Test out the products and continue to provide us feedback. Use your privacy settings so you can feel most comfortable using the site.
We hear you, and we appreciate the feedback.
Stay tuned... Mark
I love the news feed. It makes a wealth of information already available to us more conveniently available. That said, it isn't perfect, and here are a few complaints I have had about it, some of which have an implied solution that I hope the Facebook overlords are considering:
:)
1. I don't like how about a week's worth of recent events were already on our newsfeeds before we had a chance to approve it. Some people who still have not logged into their Facebook accounts for a couple of days have recent activities being broadcast to their friends list because of a feature they never approved.
2. I don't like how we don't have any control over what is automatically fed to our feed. We should be able to work through a series of checkboxes to determine what we do and do not want on our own mini-feed (while, of course, maintaining the ability to delete something from the feed).
3. I don't like the feed now lets people know about changes to NON-FRIENDS' profiles, specifically in the form of wall comments. For instance, if someone makes a comment on my wall, that other person's friends shouldn't see it in their feed unless that person is also MY friend. Friends of friends don't need to know about changes to my wall. The reason: that information was NOT available to them before, so it shouldn't be now.
4. The feed takes away some of the mystery of poking around on Facebook to find information the good old-fashioned way. Then again, I don't have that kind of time on my hands, so the new feature makes it much easier for me to keep track of profile changes people want me to see. This is not a problem for me; I just understand how some of you feel about the stalking-made-easy impression some of you get. But, well, the information was already out there.
5. I don't like how Facebook has been reduced to a mob mentality with an average IQ less than my shoesize. Facebook has fairly extensive privacy options (click the "My Privacy" link at left and look around). Every user's profile is PRIVATE to begin with, and every user can control what others can see. You can edit the default settings for each network of which you're a member, and for everyone. You can also set up your "Limited Profile" and select certain friends to see only that restricted view of your profile.
But, seriously, if you don't want someone to see something you're doing on Facebook, then why are they on your friends list (or not on your Limited Profile list)?
I love the new features. Keeping track of updates people want me to see is now much easier!
I love you, Facebook.
Retitle your speech/topic: "How we used to stalk people on Facebook"
No, you're not wrong at all. If Facebook was a public web site, you would be, but guess what? It's not.
It's a closed system that requires registration, some measure of authentication, and then even after that it STILL limits you to only seeing people in your network (e.g. college) by default.
When you break up you will tell your best friends, your good friends, and eventually the people that you hang out with (probably). You won't tell them all at the same time. Facebook (as it was) mimicked this. You change your status, only people that change your profile notice soon (if at all). So the information spreads out in the similar fashion to how it will among your "real world" social circle. It IS private, because it's restricted to people you've formally entered into "friend" relationship with.
Now, instead of a natural dispersion, the info will be broadcast the moment you change your relationship status. This is akin to calling a conference call with everyone you know to tell them all the fantastic news "I just got dumped."
-stormin
The Southern Baptist Convention has creationism. On Slashdot, we have porn.
It seems that it's hard for some people to get the difference between "availability" and "broadcasting". When I make some information available on (OLD) Facebook, it is available only to those people who cared to view my profile and actually read it there. Now this information is automatically given to all people listed as 'friends', even if they don't care. Also, due to specifics of Facebook, I cannot specify access levels; I cannot divide my friends into "groups" etc. So by default, when I make information available, it becomes available to real friends first only because they happen to be the people who open my profile ofen. It's not a question of whether "information has been disclosed". It's just that one wouldn't like it when it happens.
The change *just happened*. I'm guessing their engineers are currently typing like mad to allow users to turn off the alerts.
"it's not about aptitude, it's the way you're viewed" - Galinda
You tell your friends "eventually", but the first thing you do is rush to Facebook and update your status
When your significant other is the one who does the updating, you don't have a choice. My ex-girlfriend would update her facebook within minutes of hanging up the phone after a bad argument. This infuriated me! She changed "Relationship Status" to "single" and "Looking for" to all of {friends, dating, a relationship, random play, whatever i can get}. Every single one of our friends sees that both of our profiles at the top of their "Recently Update Profiles" list and immediately know what happened, before I had the chance to tell anyone.
This alone was bad enough. Before, people can deduce breakup information with a few clicks. Facebook now removed those extra steps. Facebook should allow options like "Don't broadcast any changes to Relationship Status". That alone would be absolutely great.
Then there are those of you who say "If you don't want people to be notified of changes to your relationship status, then don't list it, it's optional!" Right, optional. And when I tell my new girlfriend that I don't want to let the world know that I'm going out with her, I'm gonna hear "What? Are you too embarrassed to tell people you're with me? Do you want to keep your relationship with me a secret? Are you seeing someone else and you don't want her to know, is that it?". Ugh, another fight.
Here is a live counter of the number of people who have joined the "Students against Facebook News Feed" group on Facebook..... 300,000 and climbing
n cludes_LIVE_Counter
http://digg.com/tech_news/Facebook_Stalker_City_I
The facebook petition group has 323,000 members as of about 10 minutes ago. Each second by refreshing there are 50 more members... this is a mass movement and Facebook needs to listen to its customer base instead of adding random bloated features.
After one does something that would trigger a notification to all their friends via the newsfeed, he can disable notification for that event with a simple click of an X.
This link contains Javascript bookmarklets to delete all your items from Facebook feeds.
http://evernex.com/facebook
Most of this discussion is irrelevant. It's not about what Facebook has the right to do or not to do. It's about what the customers want.
Sure, mini-feed is perfectly legal and completely within the privacy terms that each user agreed to. But users don't like it. So, facebook should let users who don't like it not have it. That way, Facebook won't lose users and it will be more valuable to advertisers like Microsoft, thus making more money for Facebook. End of story.
Privacy and other moral issues are secondary, the real issue is simply the bottom line: profit. Facebook should adjust to the backlash because that's good business.
Another difference is that when someone leaves a group, it is publicly displayed. If I leave a group quietly and nearly no one notices, it's entirely different from my leaving and having it broadcasted to all of my friends that I am no longer part of "Tree Huggers" or something like that. Even though groups don't accurately describe all of the user's views, people often join groups of people with similar interests but when they leave, it makes them seem like they don't find the idea important anymore. This is a bit of an exaggeration, but I do not want all of my friends to have it pushed in their face is I leave someone's group, especially if that someone is one of my friends.
the information is public but having a detailed log of every change you make to your profile publicly visible makes it a lot easier for people to figure things out.
...
...) that you wouldn't mind having your mother read out in court while being televised on national news.
But you're perfectly OK with them having to put a little effort into it, like clicking a couple of links?
I also don't want a lot of the groups that I decided to leave available.
If you're embarrassed about the groups, shouldn't have joined them. That's a life lesson.
I don't want links to all the forum posts I make or image comments I make right there on my main page
If you're embarrassed about the posts/images, shouldn't have made them. That's a life lesson.
It's a big brother thing
Nothing of the sort. Have you actually read Nineteen Eighty-Four? Did you really understand it? You are voluntarily giving up this data to a public forum. You agreed to a set of T&C's. Surprised that it's being enforced? That's a life lesson.
When my county posts an easily searchable database on the front of their main webpage, it makes me a little more uncomfortable. I know some friends who used these records to find a teacher's house
In my day we used something called a phonebook. Handily listed the name, address and phone number of almost everyone in the area.
to vandalize.
Perhaps you should get a new set of friends.
It's all pieces of a puzzle that leaves me feeling just a little too exposed.
The only info that's being exposed is that which you've already input into a publically available site. You are, in effect, exposing yourself.
Never, ever, put anything into writing (and that includes email, forums, letters, websites
(posted AC cos I'm at a public terminal)
Some of us students have decided to replace Facebook with a community driven site. In the spirit of an open source project, the community will have a strong say in what goes in and what comes out. A site for students, by students. http://www.replacefacebook.net/
e _Facebook/
Also @ Digg http://digg.com/software/Outraged_Students_Replac
Just an update, the "Students against Facebook News Feed (Official Petition to Facebook)" now has over 630,000 users and is still growing..
Censorship is obscene. Patriotism is bigotry. Faith is a vice. Slashdot 2.0 sucks.
Not all users hate the News Feed. The first group in favor of the changes, I like the Facebook Facelift, was created about 30 minutes after the new features were added and uses the tagline: "Web 2.0 is cool."
The fact that third party tools already existed to do this is also not important, unless use of those tools was pretty widespread to the point that "a lot" of people (whatever that means to any individual user) already had this aggregation going on. As long as those users were a pretty small minority, it would have a very small impact on most others' use of the site.
Sure, over-all it would have a very small impact on the site, but nobody cares about the whole site, they care about their personal situation. When you start talking about individuals, each one is just as "stalkable" as any other, and furthermore there is nothing they can to do make themselves less 'stalkable' - it is all beyond their control anyway.
Compare this to the My Sister Sam Murder. Prior to that high profile stalking and murder, the general population was pretty much unaware of how easily their personal information could be had from public agencies like the DMV. Schaeffer was hardly the first person stalked and even killed by someone using such information, but she was famous enough that her death caused people to wake up to the danger they were in and do something about it.
Facebook's new system is like Schaeffer's murder - now everyone is aware of how vulnerable they are. But making Facebook take away the new system won't do anything to protect anyone, they are still just as vulnerable. It would be like "undoing" Schaeffer's murder - people can continue to be blissful in their ignorance, while the occasional stalker is still just as free to do harm.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.