[Correction: The original version of this story incorrectly identified the creator of Facebook. The version below is correct.]
Last night, in what amounted to an online rebellion akin to ’60s-era war protests, nearly 100,000 college students banged on Facebook’s cyberspace door, railing against the “stalkerish” changes made late Monday to the popular college networking site.
No capital letter, exclamation or F-word was restrained in wall postings on students’ Facebook pages across the country as users ranted against the changes, which effectively make transparent the long-sacred (and secret) practice of compulsively checking the site of every person they’ve ever eyeballed across a classroom.
“It creeps the bejesus out of me,” said senior history and economics major Paola Luisi. “Big Brother would be proud.”
The moment an account holder accepts friend requests, joins or declines a group, edits their profile or writes on someone’s wall, a blurb appears right beneath the individual’s basic information, such as name, school and birthday, stating what he or she’s done and when he or she did it.
The site also offers a “Mini-feed,” which focuses on the actions of one person, displaying any profile changes or additions they make.
“I hate it,” junior marketing major Lindsey Schwalb said. “They put the news feed in the middle of the profile, so basically you see the person’s name and what they’ve done for the last five days. I think it’s very creepy and a lot more stalker-ish than it used to be.”
Facebook officials stand by the site’s new features, saying they fall in line with the website’s purpose. “It’s our goal to provide a tool that helps people understand what’s going on with the people around them; all of our additions and changes contribute towards this goal,” Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said last Wednesday in an online blog. “The new things we’re going to launch will do the same.”
Thousands of students feel Zuckerberg’s concept of “understanding” goes too far, calling it an invasion of privacy.
“Since the school is so small and Facebook is used for stalking people, people can look at everything you do and a stranger can get to know you as well as a close friend – and that makes me uncomfortable,” said senior neurobiology and physiology major Sami Tannouri.
The student response has been unimaginable, with a legion of Facebook groups and thousands of blog entries popping up opposing the changes.
Groups like “Students against Facebook News Feed (Official Petition to Facebook)” have recruited nearly 100,000 students by Tuesday night.
“They kind of sprung a huge change on Facebook with no warning,” Tannouri said. “I haven’t heard anything really positive; it just raises privacy concerns and I think that was a bad move on Facebook’s part.”
Not all site users took negatively to the adjustments, however, and many said they really don’t change much about student’s secrecy.
“I believe that those who think that the new layout makes Facebook more user-friendly for stalkers don’t realize that this is all information that they could get anyway,” said freshman computer engineering major Seth Weinstein. “It just summarizes it. If people really want to keep their information safe, then they shouldn’t post it on Facebook at all.”
No matter what side of the issue one stands on, the only students benefitting from the site’s changes are the stalkers themselves, said sophomore psychology major Erica Zippert.
“I like knowing what everyone’s doing at times. It does the dirty work for you,”she said.
Staff writers Ben Slivnick, Andrew Vanacore and Kaitlyn Seith contributed to this report. Contact reporter Steven Overly at overlydbk@gmail.com.
