Facebook faces user revolt over privacy

Stan Beer
Friday, 08 September 2006 05:25

Your IT - Home IT

Number two social networking site in the US Facebook is facing a growing storm of protest from its own members over a new feature which many users say compromises their privacy.

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The problem is with a new feature called News Feeds, which automatically delivers alerts about to changes to a user's profile to all that user's Facebook contacts. Anything the user does, such as make a new contact, change an address or change a personal description is automatically broadcast to all members of the user's contact group.

Protesters say that News Feeds is an invasion of users' privacy and makes it easy for stalkers to to keep track of their prey.

With more than 10 million members, a signficant and growing proportion of members have joined a protest group on the site called Students Against Facebook News Feeds, which numbers its members at more than 600,000. There has also been a call for users to boycott the social networking site until it removes the feature.

Facebook management, however, has not so far given in to user demands. Instead it is working on adding extra privacy options for users which will enable them to hide information from News Feeds.

It is not yet clear, however, whether the Facebook changes will satisfy user demands.