Facebook Fans Express Frustration

Facebook, one of the leading online social networks, has groups for literally everyone: music, movie, and media fans; social activists; Left-handed people; dormitory and fraternity house residence; and so on.  Yet the groups the creators of Facebook may never have seen coming have begun to surface in recent days . . . the anti-Facebook groups.



On Tuesday morning, September 5^th, 2005, Facebook revealed its latest update which they entitled “News Feed.”  This latest features allows Facebook users to track the actions and activities of those within their networks, as well as to display their own changes to their profiles, group memberships, activities, et cetera.  News Feeds range from the utterly humdrum and unexciting (“Billy A. has updated his profile picture”) to the downright terrifyingly informative (“Jane B. is attending the event [Input Name Here]”).  In the Facebook blog, Ruchi Sanghvi—the product manager for the News Feed and more personalized “Mini-Feed”—stated the hope for these features was that it would “help you stay more up to date on your friends' lives.” 



“News Feed and Mini-Feed are a different way of looking at the news about your friends,” Sanghvi stated on Tuesday, “but they do not give out any information that wasn't already visible. Your privacy settings remain the same – the people who couldn't see your info before still can't see it now.”



Despite Facebook’s reassurances regarding changes and user privacy, groups began surfacing almost immediately in what may have been an unforeseen backlash to the “facelift.”  Groups with names such as “Facebook—The Place for Stalkers!”, “Facebook Knows Too Much”, and “Students against Facebook News Feed (Official Petition to Facebook”) have sent a crystal clear message to the producers of Facebook and the latest updates: “We’re not happy.”