Oogaly boogaly boo!

Now on to a rant about privacy and Facebook

Yesterday Facebook.com released a new feature which they call news feed. Basically its an embedded rss reader that tells you what has changed on your friends profile. Also they added a small one to each persons profile. Now we can look at this with two different views.

• This is an invasion of privacy. Which I can see, and the view is all well and good, except for the fact that you put your information on the site for others to see. The people looking at the news feed can see what the news feed it telling them by going to your profile.
• This is a tool that can be used to make stalking easier. The only thing I can say to that is YES!, and what is your point. Could that stalker not just go to your profile and get the same information? The answer YES!

If you use Facebook as so many do, you notice that there are people with thousands of friends. Those are the people saying statement 1. This could easily be solved by those people only having friends they are…..FRIENDS WITH!!!! Facebook could dumb there site down to deal with these assholes by making a tiered list of friends. Like “Best Friend”, “Good Friend”, “Acquaintance”, or Facebook could make the news feed an optional tool. But fuck that. Then your so called private info wouldn’t show up to acquaintance. Then there are people that are bitching about the stalking. Lets first look at the word stalker, or in this case stalking (Stalking is a legal term for repeated harassment or other forms of invasion of a person’s privacy in a manner that causes fear to its target. ) So statement 2 is stating the something as statement 1. So as I see it, three things can happen,

• 1. People can cut down the number of friends they have, to only FRIENDS!!!
• 2. Facebook can change there site to accommodate assholes like these
• 3. There assholes can take there shit somewhere else

My vote goes for 3.