From Privacy Times, September 18, 2006

FACEBOOK’S ‘NEWS FEED’ FEATURE SPARKS PRIVACY REVOLT AMONG USERS

Facebook, a wildly popular social networking Web service among college-age and college-bound students, experienced an unexpected privacy revolt among its users when it instituted new features making it easier to learn about users’ latest moves while on Facebook.

Parents of teen-age children who have not heard of Facebook, or its rival, MySpace, might not be paying close enough attention.

One irony is that these two services were already sparking growing privacy concerns among students and parents. Some schools have warned parents about allowing their children to participate on the two sites. In essence, Facebook and MySpace allow youthful users to have their own pages, and to link to the pages of friends and acquaintances, resulting in the formation of virtual social networks. This often results in boastful youths revealing intensely personal information, including sexual activities, drinking and drug use, party experiences, skipping school, pranks, personal relationships and family life. But there was a semblance of control in the sense that users could select who would be notified about new activities.

The latest privacy brouhaha arose when Facebook’s added feature, dubbed “News Feed,” launched September 5th, meant that any user’s new activities were automatically blasted to all members of that person’s social network. Within days, over 700,000 Facebook users joined a group called Students Against Facebook News Feed, which doubled as a petition asking the site to change the new feature. One of those users was Igor Hiller, an incoming University of California-Santa Barbara freshman who planned a protest outside Facebook's headquarters. The protest was cancelled after Facebook gave users the ability to opt out of the feature.

Hiller explained the impact. “Essentially, every sort of move that you did on Facebook, whether it be commenting on somebody’s picture, or joining or leaving a group, or joining or leaving an event, or any update that you did to your profile, this information would be sent to all of your contacts, alongside a timestamp saying exactly what time you did that, and that also includes relationship status. If perhaps you are now no longer in a relationship, you're single, well, that will be forwarded to all your contacts as well, along with the exact time of your breakup,” he told Mother Jones.com.

Before News Feed, he continued, any member of a network could visit your page individually and check out your profile, pictures, comments, or relationship status. “But the users felt that it was just for people who cared, and who wanted to know,” he said. “But now, all of this information was thrown down the throats of everyone, and it was very strange.”