In your Facebook

This story was sent to you by: Megan

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In your Facebook
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Site's users protest a new feature
they say invades privacy

From news services

September 8 2006

Facebook.com is suddenly getting the cold shoulder on campus.

The operators of the Web site wanted to help users save time by highlighting changes their friends make to their personal profile pages. Instead, the new feature has drawn complaints from thousands of its users and even threats of a boycott.

The backlash is over Facebook's decision this week to deliver automated, customized alerts known as News Feeds.

The feature culls fresh information users post about themselves--Tim is now single--and delivers it in headline-news format to their network of buddies. Facebook unveiled the feature at midnight Monday, saying it would make new information easier to find. Within hours, online protest groups were formed, and thousands of people had joined.

"You went a bit too far this time, facebook," read an introductory message for Students Against Facebook News Feed, a protest group created by Northwestern University student Benjamin Parr and a student at the University of Iowa.

Meanwhile, a student at the University of Florida launched "A Day Without Facebook" campaign to get members there to organize a boycott of the site on Tuesday.

The new feature is "a little bit creepy," said Hilary Lee, 20, a junior at the University of Chicago. "Everyone on campus is upset about it. ...

"This is all information that you could find out if you were interested enough, but to have it presented on a silver platter is kind of unnerving."

For example, Lee said, News Feed let you know when someone's online, which "makes it easier to find them, if you wanted to go to their house or something."

Such a strong reaction in defense of privacy is rare among the teens and twentysomethings who grew up in the era of public disclosure in the form of blogs, video sharing and reality TV. Until now, questions about the wisdom of disclosure were raised primarily by parents, teachers and university administrators, while students flocked to Facebook and similar sites such as MySpace, Xanga and LiveJournal.

Joining Facebook requires a legitimate e-mail account at a school or business. Members can decide how private they want their profile to be by limiting access, for example, to only undergraduates, faculty or individuals. As a result, Facebook has fewer than 10 million registered users, compared with some 108 million at MySpace.

The protests led Facebook's founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg to post a response titled, "Calm Down. Breathe. We Hear You."

"We're not oblivious of the Facebook groups popping up about this,'' Zuckerberg wrote of the protests. "And we agree, stalking isn't cool; but being able to know what's going on in your friends' lives is. This is information people used to dig for on a daily basis, nicely reorganized and summarized so people can learn about the people they care about."

Some Facebook users say the new feature is par for the course.

"I don't understand why people put their entire lives on the Internet. If you're going to put so much up, you have to expect that the whole world is going to see it," said DePaul freshman Claire Napoletano, 18.

Facebook prides itself on privacy.

A user's profile details, including contact information, relationship status and hobbies, generally are hidden from others unless they are part of that user's network of friends or institution, such as a college.

In addition, users have the option of hiding specific details from certain users--choosing, for instance, to show photos to college buddies but not to co-workers.

Zuckerberg said Thursday that privacy remains central to the site, but he acknowledged the company misstepped and "failed to communicate to our users actively what it actually meant for them." Zuckerberg said Facebook was working on giving users additional privacy options.

The safeguards, expected as early as Friday, would let users block from feeds entire categories--such as changes to the groups they belong to--while still allowing people to observe such changes by visiting the profile page.

[ RedEye's Alexia Elejalde-Ruiz, AP, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal contributed. ]