East Tennessean

Issue date: 9/11/06 Section: ViewPoint

For stalkers and aspiring stalkers alike, there is a powerful new tool on the Internet, Facebook (www.facebook.com). Without even trying, you can view every mundane detail of a person's activities and keep up not only with whom they are talking to, but what they are saying. The possibilities are limitless. Facebook's new feature will make sitting outside a person's window watching them sleep passé, just as the cell phone made sitting by your phone on a Friday night waiting for it to ring a thing of the past. Stalking 2.0: Facebook.
Though I doubt that Facebook's new mini-feed feature is intended as a creepy stalker tool, that's what many of ETSU's students are saying about it.
Bethany Farmer, a 22-year-old history major said, "The new Facebook feed is not only an extreme invasion of my personal privacy, but is also one of the most obnoxious and convoluted formats known to mankind."
Facebook, the college and high school networking site, is a way to keep in touch with your friends around the country and to stay current with their lives. Last week, in what would seem an effort to make those things easier on the user, Facebook added a mini-feed to each user's homepage.
The mini-feed is a feature on Facebook that lists everything everyone on your friend list is doing. From updating anything on their profile to commenting on someone else's to joining or leaving groups to uploading photos to nearly anything else, the mini-feed keeps you up to date whether you want to be or not. That's specifically the problem that some students have with this new feature.
"As soon as I log into Facebook, I get bombarded by messages like, 'Jason is doing whatever he wants.' Guess what? I don't care," said Stephanie Wise, a 23-year-old psychology major.
Personally, I enjoy this innovation and view it as the next logical step in what Facebook is about. Self- described, Facebook is an online directory that connects people through social networks. It is designed as a way to keep up-to-date with your friends. That is exactly what the mini-feed does. I think it is a good thing in two important ways; it takes all the work out of being nosy and it forces people to pay attention to me.
I am apparently not the only one in support of there being no such thing as privacy. Richard Rader, a 21-year-old computer science major, said, "It lets me be a stalker without feeling bad."
The only thing that would make it better would be Spyware that installs a keystroke counter on your computer when you log on, and then posts every Web site you visit, every e-mail you send and every instant messenger conversation you have right there on the news feed. For Mac users, it could even commandeer the built-in web cam and put up periodic pictures of whatever you may be doing no matter how pathetic or scandalous.
Perhaps in the near future Facebook will partner with the major cell phone companies so that you can keep up with whom your friends are calling and what they are talking about as well.
Let's see how long it takes Homeland Security to appropriate this popular web service.
Forget Big Brother, Facebook is watching.

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