I need to vent some bile at the latest stupidity on Facebook to catch my attention: the proliferation of apps and groups that claim to give the user the ability to see who has been looking at their profile info.
First of all, Facebook is an important communication tool. It has become, for me, as important as my email and feeds. Aside from the obvious benefit of being able to keep in touch with friends and acquaintances, Facebook allows you to re-establish connections that have been severed over the years, and via Facebook chat you have another tool which makes it easy to get in touch with friends. Maybe your friends have never used AIM, ICQ or any of the other instant messaging apps, but everyone uses Facebook. I use Facebook chat all the time to talk to my wife. It’s faster than email, and I can usually find her on Facebook thanks to her Farmville addiction. I recently installed a patch for my phone’s operating system that adds Facebook chat functionality to my phone’s texting program.
So I don’t have an anti-Facebook bent. It’s a valuable social tool and I use it.
The Facebook phenomenon this week that is drawing my ire are the apps and groups that claim to give the user the ability to see who has been looking at their profile. Let me address this idiocy:
For God’s sake, I hope someone is looking at my profile information. That’s why I put it there. I have my Facebook permissions set so that only friends can see my info, my posts, my pictures, everything. Presumably I want the people I have friended to have access to all of these. Presumably all of my friends are smart enough to realize that they should have their privacy settings toggled to friends-only as well.
It’s a social networking site, stupid. If you are that worried about who is looking at your profile then perhaps you shouldn’t be on Facebook at all. Delete your account and sit in your house with the curtains drawn and don’t answer the phone.
Any questions?
