Facebook's Woes and Other Problems

I have seldom seen so much anger out of college and high school students than I have over the new Facebook News Feed.

For those unfamiliar with Facebook, or if you just haven't logged on in a while, Facebook News Feed pretty much lets you know EVERYTHING that happens with all your Facebook friends, and I do mean EVERYTHING. You know what groups your friends joined, who they became friends with (which is kind of silly, considering you don't know half the people your friends know at other colleges), and you know when they change something on their profile or "status."

The final result was, as so many people put it, "stalker-esque." People didn't want to know what some of their friends were doing, and more people didn't want others to know what they were doing. The resulting anger spawned countless groups on Facebook, including one that sent a petition to Facebook demanding changes.

The outcry sparked an apologetic letter from Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg that appeared on my Facebook homepage this morning. Here are some excerpts:

"We really messed this one up. When we launched News Feed and Mini-Feed we were trying to provide you with a stream of information about your social world. Instead, we did a bad job of explaining what the new features were and an even worse job of giving you control of them. I'd like to try to correct those errors now..."

"...We didn't build in the proper privacy controls right away. This was a big mistake on our part, and I'm sorry for it. But apologizing isn't enough. I wanted to make sure we did something about it, and quickly. So we have been coding nonstop for two days to get you better privacy controls. This new privacy page will allow you to choose which types of stories go into your Mini-Feed and your friends' News Feeds, and it also lists the type of actions Facebook will never let any other person know about. If you have more comments, please send them over."

I personally admit to joining the petition group: "Students Against Facebook News Feed." With all due respect to my law school colleague Evan, who does make a valid point ("My mantra - don't put or say anything on Facebook that you wouldn't want physically posted in your University's Union bulletin boards. Now that you are suddenly aware of what a dedicated person (stalker, employer, professor) could have - and now any person instantly can- found out about you, change it."), I still must protest these changes.

My reasoning: unfortunately, in both high school and college, there will be occasional stalker-esque boys and girls, and tensions among friends, couples, and certain social groups will run high. This being the case, these tensions might boil over if one friend sees his/her friend join a group or befriend an individual that the original friend cannot agree with. Bad things, especially if dealing with stalker-esque boys or girls, may follow from this. It seems silly that tensions should start over things on Facebook, but the reality is...it happens. There are certain innocent things that could cause enormous fights, and Facebook's lack of privacy features for News Feed seems to set the stage for such conflicts. If, on the off chance someone would be emotionally or physically hurt, or even killed over such things (in this day and age, I cannot say definitively that it wouldn't happen), I think the outcry at Facebook would be even greater, even though probably undeserved. For this reason, I cannot agree with Facebook's changes; inevitably, Facebook must do more to protect people's privacy.

That said, I think this decision was not thought out very well on Facebook's part. I understand where Facebook was coming from though, being that they are losing much ground to MySpace and maybe other websites in terms of users and features. The pressure to keep pace with these sites inevitably forced Facebook to brainstorm new, unwise ideas, and add a new feature quicker than it probably should have. At the very least, it looks as if Facebook panicked facing such competition. I cannot sympathize because Facebook's creators make much more money than I do, but on the same token, I cannot say that if I were Facebook's creators, I wouldn't have felt the same pressure to do the same thing.

Regardless, the one thing I wish more than anything else in the world is that the people on Facebook who protested these changes so boisterously put half as much passion and effort into other national and world causes as they did protesting Facebook. It speaks volumes about the current generation that Yahoo! wrote in an article (follow the link at the top), "Generation Y had previously been shockingly devil-may-care in its attitude towards privacy, but News Feed seems to be the last straw."

I cannot help but wonder if much of Generation Y felt remotely the same way about President Bush's wiretapping policies. I also cannot help but wonder if they even knew that a District Court judge ruled against the President's power to do this.

In that regard, perhaps this fury over Facebook's new feature highlights a bigger problem among Generation Y: the nearly complete inability to see beyond their own private worlds. If there IS such tunnel vision on the part of Generation Y, I fear for the future. This nation and this world cannot continue to espouse the attitude, "Nothing is important enough to make me care unless it directly affects me and my immediate surroundings."

I fear that such an apathetic and isolationist attitude could elect another President Bush, and such thinking seems even more dangerous as we approach the 5th anniversary of the September 11th attacks. I believe that it was partly the casual, "They'd never attack on American soil" dismissal of terrorist threats by our own leaders that led to the attacks. We cannot afford to have another generation thinking this way.

I am optimistic when I see people joining different political causes on Facebook. I can only hope that these people carry those causes over to make a difference outside the "Facebook box."

**UPDATE**

Facebook, responding to the pressure, has upgraded their privacy features to allow an individual to remove all news and notes from the News Feed feature. The petition group applauded the move and thanked Facebook for responding so rapidly to the protests.

Time will tell if the damage is already done, and I can only reiterate the rest of my concerns.