Issue date: 9/18/06 Section: Opinion

JIm Gibbs - The Battalion

Facebook.com underwent a drastic facelift, adding a feature called the "News Feed." This function keeps members of Facebook aware of changes that their friends within the network have made. These modifications include changes in relationship status, new friends that have been added and changes in the favorite movies listed, as well as displaying notes, a blog-like feature, the user may have posted for their friends to read.

Within hours of the modifications being posted, hundreds of groups had been created on the Web site in protest of the News Feed. This included the group "Students Against Facebook News Feed (Official Petition to Facebook)," which grew to nearly 750,000 members in a matter of days. The complaint from the majority of protestors was the lack of privacy this new feature left them. However, Facebook's new feature hardly represents a paradigmatic shift for the Web site, but is rather only an expansion of accessibility to information the site already made available.

The new changes to Facebook represented, for the most part, a consolidation of information already available elsewhere on the site. Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook, explained this nicely in a letter posted on the Facebook main page the day the changes were made (Sept. 5): "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," Zuckerberg said. The information is only shown to a user's friends, people who the user was already giving access to the information anyway, albeit in a non-centralized form.

But Facebook's users continued to complain, only settling down with the introduction of the News Feed privacy controls. The only thing these controls provide is automation of privacy tasks already performable by the user - adding no substantial difference in security, only making it easier for the user to delete certain information. Granted, this ease of use is a good thing, but is this all that the hundreds of thousands of protesting users were really after?

Zuckerberg notes in his second letter apropos of the News Feed (the Sept. 8 "Open Letter") that one of his main concerns is the free flow of information on the Internet. On the eponymous Facebook group, he remarks that "Facebook is designed to be as good of a vehicle as possible for the free flow of information." Everything that a user posts on Facebook, whether on their own profile or that of another, is accessible to others that the user has already implicitly consented this access. The News Feed, on the other hand, was only applicable to a user's designated friends, explicitly given access to more private information.

What this debacle has made clear is that many of Facebook's users are not willing to take individual responsibility for the freedom that freedom of information creates, demanding the Web site do it for them. Freedom of information requires that one be aware of what he says on the Internet and careful of what he makes known in such a public forum. The new privacy controls afforded by Facebook are certainly an improvement in terms of the general quality of the site, but citizens of the Web must never be complacent about what they want kept private, or the free flow of information that now marks the Internet may one day be threatened.

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