Facebook and privacy

In September 2006, Facebook introduced a new feature on their website called “News Feeds”, which presented the Internet community with an ethical dilemma regarding information access and privacy. As users logged in into their accounts, the new service would display every recent activity of their friend base within the Facebook system. The new feature, on the one hand, presented users with the efficient tool to chronologically track the updates of friend’s accounts, yet on the other hand it provoked a tremendous outrage from the Facebook community since there has also been privacy implications concerned.

On the online conference Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, explained that the goal of “News Feeds” feature was to aid users to “keep tabs on their friends”, and feeds broadcast the information that is already public. Of course, Zuckerberg makes a valid argument, but are concerns of the Facebook community equally legitimate? In the context of the online community the issue, at first glance, may seem nonessential, yet let’s consider the following nuances:
Firstly, even though the personal information could be easily accessed anyway, “if you bother to look”, when it’s involuntary imposed on people it’s likely to produce an entirely different reading possibilities, as the information distributed among the entire friend-list is usually in fragments and taken out of contexts most likely to lead to misinterpretation.

Secondly, lets take the issue one step further. Let’s imagine the “real-life” scenario where every step we undertake during the day is monitored and automatically broadcasted to all the people we share acquaintance with. The new location tagging feature on Facebook Places gives enough a reason for interesting polemics regarding the issues of surveillance and privacy in our every day lives.