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."

Comments

Yeah, stalking IS supposed to be hard

[Anonymous Coward]

They're taking all of the sport out of it.

Re:Yeah, stalking IS supposed to be hard

[glittalogik]

Back in the old days, you had to get someone's surname, phone number, a directory and a mp book before you could even get started. Fun times, fun times...

Re:Yeah, stalking IS supposed to be hard

[The Only Druid]

So, just to clarify: you don't want your breakups made public, but you post information about those breakups on a website that's wide open to every person with an .edu email address? I bow before your brilliance in understanding the term "public".

Re:Yeah, stalking IS supposed to be hard

[rickb928]

Don't want them public? Dont' post relationship info on facebook.

Sheesh. People will read ANYTHING you post.

Don't criticize something you don't understand. Especially other people.

And WHAT privacy does Facebook afford? Apprently that which many do not avail themselves of, what with posting info. If you read the EULA, it says:

"All content on the Web site, including but not limited to design, text, graphics, other files, and their selection and arrangement (the "Content"), are the proprietary property of the Company or its licensors. All rights reserved."

and

"By posting Member Content to any part of the Web site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, perform, display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such information and content and to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such information and content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing."

and

"You may remove your Member Content from the Web site at any time. If you choose to remove your Member Content, the license granted above will automatically expire."

and

"You are solely responsible for your interactions with other Facebook Members. We reserve the right, but have no obligation, to monitor disputes between you and other Members."

and

"The Company is not responsible for the conduct, whether online or offline, of any user of the Web site or Member of the Service."

Then the fun begins. In their Privacy Policy:

"Facebook follows two core principles:

1. You should have control over your personal information.
Facebook helps you share information with your friends and people around you. You choose what information you put in your profile, including contact and personal information, pictures, interests and groups you join. And you control with whom you share that information through the privacy settings on the My Privacy page.

2. You should have access to the information others want to share.
There is an increasing amount of information available out there, and you may want to know what relates to you, your friends, and people around you. We want to help you easily get that information."

Yeah, you should have privacy, but Facebook reserves the right to "use, copy, perform, display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such information" as they see fit, stated in their EULA. I think that means they can in fact publish most anything you provide as 'content'. Personal information should be bound by the Privacy Policy, but sheesh, what ISN'T 'personal'? What you listened to this morning in your shower? The fact that you took a shower? The fact that you're not deaf? Such a slippery slope...

and

"If you post personally identifiable information in areas of the site accessible to other users, you should be aware that such information can be read, collected, or used by other users of these forums, and could be used improperly to send you unsolicited messages."

Darn. and,

"Profile information you submit to Facebook will be available to users of Facebook who belong to at least one of the networks you allow to access the information through your privacy settings (e.g., school, geography, friends of friends). Your name, school name, and profile picture thumbnail will be available in search results across the Facebook network unless you alter your privacy settings. This is primarily so your friends at other schools can find you and send a friend request. People who see your name in searches, however, will not be able to access your profile information unless they have a relationship to you (friend, friend of friend, member of your school's network, etc.) that allows such access based on your privacy settings."

Sounds li

Re:Yeah, stalking IS supposed to be hard

[AnyoneEB]

No, you do not understand. It is one thing to have one's profile say "In a Relationship with So and So" one day and "Single" the next, with no way for the viewer to know what it said previously without having viewed that profile earlier. It is different to show "Person broke up with So and So" on their profile. Stop saying that the information was already public. It was not. This is adding more information which a large number of users do not want shared.

Re:Yeah, stalking IS supposed to be hard

[1u3hr]

No, you do not understand. It is one thing to have one's profile say "In a Relationship with So and So" one day and "Single" the next, with no way for the viewer to know what it said previously without having viewed that profile earlier.

I don't understand either. You document your "being in a relationship" on a website, change it later, and are surprised that anyone notices. Everyone who you would want to know about this would know from real life (or a personal communication), not a website. Anyone who's "stalking" you online would have noticed the change anyway. So what's different?

Putting your romantic life on a website is an extraordinarily bad and naive idea. Put stuff online, the world knows, forever. Learn that now.

Re:Yeah, stalking IS supposed to be hard

[johansalk]

I'll explain. Public means parents in this context. It's OK for every college girl and guy in the .edu world to know what you did in that party, drunken threesome and all, but Mom and Dad should have a hard time at finding out.

Re:Yeah, stalking IS supposed to be hard

[rlbond86]

Your name is Rick Blake.

You are the webmaster of CyberNexus.

You can be contacted at webmaster@cybernexus.net.

This was all public information. Now it's been announced. See the difference?

Let's say I break up with my girlfriend. Previously, I would simply change my relationship status to "single." Eventually, my closer friends would notice that my relationship status changed.

Now, it is announced to the world as soon as it would happen. There's a difference between publicly available and publicly announced. As an analogy: the former is adding a line in your slashdot personal profile that you had a divorce. The latter is having a story greenlighted on slashdot, that you just had a divorce. Both are public information, but would you really want it announced?

Just because we choose to disclose something does not mean we wish to draw attention to it when the situation changes. Even something as innocuous as an invitation to a party shows up; if I decline the invitation, everyone knows I just declined.

You are not a college student, and you do not live in the same sort of social environment where it is encouraged to share contact information publicly to be included in events and meet new people. We knowingly give up some of our privacy when we do so, but there is a limit.

I'm sure if I dug around your website or google, I could find your (real) email address, so why don't you post it on slashdot? It's public information, after all? What about your phone number? Knowing your name and city, I could easily find it, so why isn't it in your slashdot profile? It's not in your profile because you don't want to call attention to it.

Re:Yeah, stalking IS supposed to be hard

[Praxx]

Putting your romantic life on a website is an extraordinarily bad and naive idea. Put stuff online, the world knows, forever. Learn that now.

Try explaining to your girlfriend why you won't set your profile to read "in a relationship" with her. I'll give you a hint: as much sense as your argument makes, all she is going to hear is "I'm not that important to you."

Then again, I guess most people here would never have that problem...

"Stalking is supposed to be hard"

[XanC]

WHOOSH

I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding of what sites like Facebook are.

That's public information, folks!

Re:"Stalking is supposed to be hard"

[Karthikkito]

Yes, and in many counties, so is the amount of property tax you paid, how much you contributed to Sheriff candidate X, and so on -- but one has to go and look for it. This move is much like everyone on your street receiving an update each time you do something that would be placed on public record.

Re:"Stalking is supposed to be hard"

[MadJoy]

Then again, in the words of one intelligent facebooker user, "There's a difference between 'publicly available' and 'publicly announced.'"

Re:"Stalking is supposed to be hard"

[John Hurliman]

So society would be no different if a big banner was hung on your porch saying "this resident has just been convicted of a DUI!"? After all, the court records are publically available information.

Don't Put Yourself Online Then

[MankyD]

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.

Stalking is supposed to be hard?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

facebook changes

[FalconDelta]

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.

What's so bad

[Anonymous Coward]

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 almost failed a class today because of this

[pHatidic]

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.

difference between "not private" and "announced"

[wibs]

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.

The new changes create a Big Brother-like record.

[adf2006]

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.

Information Overload.

[Enoxice]

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.

Just an update to the article:

[coastal984]

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

Re:difference between "not private" and "announced

[MankyD]

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'."

This one's a real toughy but let me point out how to fix this: if you don't want people knowing about your relationship status DON'T PLASTER IT UP ON A PUBLIC WEBSITE. Seriously, this is not that hard of a concept. If you don't enter that you broke up into face book, the world will never know...

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.)

facebook's "new coke"

[Valar]

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.

kids today

[macadamia_harold]

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.

Re:difference between "not private" and "announced

[BusDriver]

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?)

Re:Yes

[MadJoy]

However, when you opt-out of a particular story, it takes it off your own mini-feed, but not the main feed on each person's homepage.

ironic...

[ff3j]

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

Re:difference between "not private" and "announced

[Achromatic1978]

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".

Good thing Facebook made the new changes

[mozumder]

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..

Re:Bottom line

[symbolic]

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.

Facebook's reply

[master811]

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

why i don't like the new facebook

[harlemjoe]

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.