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Facebook Adds Friend Stalker Tool
nk497 writes "Facebook has added a new tool that brings together conversations and photos between friends onto a single page, but — as usual — has crossed the creepy line. Not only does clicking the See Friendship tool let users view photos, comments and events shared between themselves and their friend, it also offers a search tool to do the same between any two mutual friends, making it easy to see everything any two people have ever said to each other Facebook. As usual, the site should have tested the function out on their users first, with one saying: 'I've always wanted this! And yes, I'm a creepy stalker.' Also, as usual for Facebook, all users are automatically opted in, and there's currently no obvious way to turn it off."
Delete your Facebook account like I did.
... or you could keep it, and not post anything you consider private on it.
But I also have a lot of not-so-close friends, acquaintances, people I'm friendly with. Whatever you want to call it, there are degrees of friendship. And Facebook doesn't recognize that.
Yeah it does, if you can be bothered with the admin.
You can create groups, and categorise your contacts into them. Then you can specify how much of your profile and your activity can be seen by each group.
I have a "limited profile" group, into which I place people who ask to be a "friend", when I feel it would be rude to ignore them, but don't really want them to see everything.
You can also choose to prevent friends-of-friends from seeing your stuff.
At worst, the defaults are possibly a bit too open.
Why should there ever be a law? Facebook is doing nothing wrong.
There needs to be user education. There needs to be an instilled sense of distrust, scepticism and paranoia.
If the users weren't that fucking stupid as to trust Facebook, there would be no issue.
It's not. If you know just ONE idiot who uses it that turned on autosync in the iphone app, Facebook has your data. No opt in OR out.
I'm surprised that company was able to stay in business if they're that psychotic about their employees' activities outside of work.
They were incredibly successful for a small company, and grew to dominate their vertical market. They were largely self-insured, and would fire people for doing things likely to make their health insurance rates go up (but also for crazy reasons, but the smoking/motorcycle stuff was at least in the employment agreement).
I'll have to take your word for it that any of this really happened but it makes me wonder how anyone can even work under such conditions. If managers are spending that much time checking up on their employees' leisure activities, who the hell is running the company?
From Wikipedia:
Five months after the merger was completed, the new ownership of the company began to make broad changes to the daily operations of the business.[5] As the Houston Business Journal reported, "the blending of the two firms has created a culture clash that's led to the departure of Reynolds employees, from executives to field technicians, both through lay-offs and of their own volition, since last August [2006]. Reynolds' local employee base has shrunk at least 10 percent since January 2006."[5] In October 2007, pre-merger CEO Fin O'Neill left the company.
They had an incredibly high turnover rate, and eventually had to open offices in new cities just because eveyone in Houston had heard of them and they had a hard time hiring. They simply didn't care. Small companies are simply spread across the spectrum of human behavior, because their owners are. Computer Associates was worse (their former CEO is in jail), and they were large and publicly traded. Ideally people just work for better places, but in the meantime, privacy still matters online.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.