Tech Blog

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The privacy battle with Facebook seems unlikely to end so long as the site continues to serve up information and imagery that isn’t meant for everyone’s eyes. The “See Friendship” button that now adorns wall posts got me thinking about this, since it actually makes it very easy to snoop in on someone you don’t have on your friends list.

See Friendship is basically an extension of the “See Wall-to-Wall” page that showed walled conversations in a threaded format. Now, the page will show wall posts comments and photos that have you and the other person tagged. What I find particularly unsettling about this is that others can also see this page by clicking on the same link because it shows up for anyone who visits your profile.

Granted, I’m not hiding from anyone, and I don’t really post things on Facebook with any semblance of regularity, but I can imagine a few scenarios where this could be a problem. Ex-lovers or ex-friends who still have mutual friends is one of the easiest to point out. Using this feature, it becomes even easier for an ex to creep and see what a former lover is up to.

As is any interaction between two friends that isn’t meant to be seen by everyone. Then there is the debilitating effect of seeing your friends communicate and have a grand old time — without you even knowing there were any plans.

It’s entirely true that private messages or even non-Facebook methods of communicating would mitigate some of these concerns, but why not give the option to turn off the See Friendship feature? I’m sure many Facebook users were quite comfortable with just the wall-to-wall thread. In fact, there’s even a Facebook group devoted to opting out of it.

Is it an invasion of privacy or a useful way of aggregating content between two particular friends? The answer might be somewhere in between, but for me, it will make me think twice before I start rambling about anything that can be open to that kind of scrutiny.