Faceoff


An online service screws up, and it's users demand change
A while back I did I very brief entry on the online generation's expectations of privacy.

My conclusions were different from the article I linked to, I thought that people weren't that concerned about what they had chosen to share on the internet, but they were very concerned with the things that they did not choose to share.

Well, it's come up again with an online service called Facebook.

The urge to tweak the model, to improve the experience, got the best of Facebook. It wasn't as if personal information weren't always available on the site. If you were interested in someone, you'd probably be able to snoop around their profile a little and see if they were in a relationship. An interesting evening could be spent in a dorm room, prowling for information.

But the new Facebook, with a feature called "news feeds,'' took it to a new level: Whenever any of your friends made a change to his or her profile, you would be notified as soon as you checked in.
Bryson Peckenpaugh, who will be a freshman at UCLA this year, was on Facebook at 1 a.m. last Tuesday when they made the change. One of the first things he saw was a photo of a couple he knew who had been together for at least a year.

Apparently, they had just broken up. But they didn't know that Facebook had changed its display, which put the news front and center on the computer screen as soon as any friend signed on.
"Bad luck for them,'' Peckenpaugh says. "It just shows that having information open to the public and having information published to the public are two different things.''

Danah Boyd, a Cal doctoral candidate whose specialty is Internet social interaction, calls the new Facebook a "privacy train wreck.'' Boyd compares it to "screaming in a loud environment when suddenly the music stops and everyone hears the end of your sentence.''

But Facebook didn't get that it had created a monster. The service makes it easy for members to spread the word about events or to join groups. And suddenly there were lots of new groups to join.
A group called "Students against Facebook News Feeds'' began rallying members at an astonishing rate. Ironically, the news-feed feature helped encourage members to join groups that were bashing the new concept.

By 2:15 p.m. last Tuesday, the day of the new plan, that group had grown to more than 100,000 members. By Friday, it had reached 700,000 and was spamming Zuckerberg's e-mail address with a petition of complaint. College newspapers began to weigh in. A columnist at the Columbia Daily Spectator suggested, mostly tongue in cheek, that "the Facebook news feed is our generation's Vietnam.''

And all without government intervention.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Tue - September 12, 2006 at 07:16 AM  Tag


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