Facebook Privacy

Facebook is a great program for keeping up with friends, especially when people have moved away and daily contact is not a feasible option. Searching for friends is easy. Once you've connected with your friends you can send messages, share photos, join groups of shared interest, as well as other fun activities. Often people will update their status, letting friends know what they're up to or how they're feeling. Every time a person changes something in their Facebook account, that information can show up in the news feed of every one of their friends. This free flow of information has led some to claim concern over the lack of privacy for Facebook users.

When I first heard about Facebook, I was at work and one of the girls jokingly mentioned how great Facebook was for stalking. "You can stalk your friends and not even leave your computer." What she meant was all of the news feeds that pop up on your home page. On any given day you can find out if a friend added a new application, who they've added as a friend, any new groups they've joined, their status updates, among other information. These news feeds are very helpful for those who are far away from some of their friends, as it makes them feel that they are still in touch. Other folks feel that these news feeds give away too much information, and creates a familiarity that wouldn't normally exist in the 'real' world. Even if the news feeds were not on everyone's homepage, the information contained in them would still be available, albeit a bit of searching may be involved.

For those worried about privacy, Facebook has different privacy settings. You can control who sees your profile, as well as go through and pick which sections they can view. Whether you only want your friends, or those in your network or don't care who looks at your profile, you decide it all. Though a few people had issues with the news feeds that show up on your home page, I personally enjoy seeing what my friends are up to. Since every aspect of Facebook has it's own privacy setting, it's easy to pick and choose who sees what. With customizable settings, a mother can decide to allow only those on her friends list to see the new pictures of her children, while it allows the college student to show the world what they did last weekend. Facebook recently announced it would make member profiles accessible through search engines like Google. Again, you can opt out of this feature, personally I'm not worried about it as I googled my name and after 5 pages still didn't find my profile.

The world wide web has opened a lot of doors in communication. Being able to meet, stay in contact with and talk to people all over the world is something unheard of a few decades ago. The challenge is knowing how much information to release and what to keep to yourself. The older generations seem to be better at keeping things to themselves, while the younger generations seem to enjoy posting themselves all over the 'net. One must wonder how they will feel once they've 'grown up' and their young antics are still available for their children or employers to find.

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