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Lighthearted Facebook Friends Could Make You Join NAMBLA Group
mykos writes "The Facebook groups feature is causing bit of a stir with its users. TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington was allegedly added to a group about NAMBLA, and in turn, he added Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. It's all in good (albeit tasteless) fun, except when a harmless joke goes awry and you find yourself being detained by customs when a friend decided to drag you into a mock terrorist group. Facebook representatives are aware of the matter, but are dismissive of it. A Facebook spokeswoman said, 'If you have a friend that is adding you to Groups you do not want to belong to, or they are behaving in a way that bothers you, you can tell them to stop doing it, block them or remove them as a friend — and they will no longer EVER have the ability to add you to any Group.' In somewhat related news, guillotines ensure you won't have dandruff on your shoulders anymore."
Your friends have too much power as it is, if you don't trust them. Being added to a group really means nothing in the context of privacy, it just means your name will (probably temporarily) appear on the list of members. If you can't trust your friends to not add you to groups you don't want to be in, you should not trust them with access to all the other info you have in Facebook.
Removing your friends from a social network, isn't actually removing them as friends in real life. The real problem here, is that you can't tell fiction from reality, and that FB actually allows friends to add your to groups.