Facebook and Privacy

"How did this get on here," is a phrase that I have come to accompany with Facebook and its tagging feature.  Tagging is the feature that lets you mention to a friend that they appeared in one of your photographs.  They usually get a notification that you "tagged" them, even though I remember hearing that they didn't used to give notifications.  This seems like a great idea, except not all photographs that everyone puts up is..."safe".  For example, I have many family members as friends on Facebook.  I went to a hookah bar with friends and joined in legal activity.  One of my friends posted a suspicious picture and tagged me in it.  In order to get it to come down Facebook made me send him a personal message asking him to take it down.  He took a long time to see the message and I was left answering to nosy family members.  Tagging is just one of the many problems Facebook has with privacy.

In the beginning, Facebook was exclusive to Harvard students only, just as the film, The Social Network illustrated.  I remember when they expanded Facebook to people younger than college students.  After that I started to receive messages about certain people that would ask me whether I knew a particular person on my friends list.  They would even send many warnings telling users to not accept people that you don't actually know.  I could tell that Facebook was really being careful about their security.

 But as the years went by,  it seemed as though Facebook stopped caring along the way. There were slip up, like when I sent someone a friend request their statuses would appear on my wall but when I tried to view their page I wasn't their friend and the friend request was pending.  I was friends even when they didn't want to be.  Another recent feature is the "seen" indicator in the messages.  This blurb appears on the sender's chat box when the receiver has seen the message.  This is a problem because you are able to send messages to people who are not on your friends list.  These users could be anyone including strangers, enemies or people you are trying to avoid.  When you read the message, they are able to see that you have read it and at what time.  This could prove awkward if you choose to not want to respond.

General sharing of information has its difficulties as well within the realm of Facebook.  There are privacy settings that any user is welcome to alter but the way to go about changing them can be a little unclear at times.  There is the option to let only your friends see your profile and pictures, then there is the option to let friends of friends see it too.  Facebook likes to post everything that you do on your wall and your friends wall such as, relationship status changes, new photos uploaded, and, if you have Spotify, what music you listen to.  The users are becoming more aware of the options surrounding their online security.

Between Facebook's tagging issues and ghost friends there is obviously a lot to be desired.  Not all websites are error free and Facebook, being one of the most popular websites, is no excuse.  Facebook is meant to be for social networking.  No one should put anything online they don't want others to see.  The information that Facebook sends to the people on your friends would be acceptable if it it was meant for everyone's eyes.  However, since we are human beings we live private lives.