Article 1: Web Social Site Facebook Hit by Privacy Protests

The New York Times recently published the article "Web Social Site Facebook Hit by Privacy Protests." Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook, an online social community, in 2004. Since then, Facebook has grown and become a trend among colleges and recently to high school students. It differs from its competitor, MySpace.com because it restricts membership to certain groups, particularly college students with an .edu email address.

The article discusses a recent privacy issue members are having with an introduced feature. The feature is called a "news feed". It immediately notifies a user's friends when he or she has updated their site. This initially does not seem to be an outrageous idea, but to some members it is a privacy issue. One argument by students is that it seems to allow other to "stalk" a member of the community. The article mentions recent events with privacy issues, particularly credit card theft, which may be contributing to heightened security concern. Zuckerberg explains in his blog post that the new feature is not to allow others to stalk you, but rather to allow a friend to know what is going on in your lives.

Facebook continues to grow, allowing more members other than college students to join including high school students, some major companies, non-profit groups, and member of the military. The nature of the web site is more private than myspace.com. I believe that the feature is an added bonus for some and is simply a way to know what is going on in a friend's life. On the other hand, this new feature can be annoying and seem to reveal too much information. The question is at what point does this feature cross the line of revealing too much information. This feature has its advantages but can also be used inappropriately by some, but hopefully not by your facebook friends!