Facebook flap

For its users, Facebook crossed a line this week. A protest group of them called Students Against Facebook News Feed said Facebook violated user privacy rights by aggregating info users already make publicly available into a "news feed" that alerts people on their friends lists to even the smallest updates on their pages so the recipients don't have to dig around. "By late on Wednesday, more than 500,000 of Facebook's 9.5 million members had signed an online petition" against the new feature, MIT's Technology Review reported. For more tech-savvy people, this is a Web 2.0 version "push" vs. "pull" - pushing out info instead of waiting for users to be pulled in to see it - and critics using Facebook called it "creepy" or like being stalked. What makes it mainstream tech news is that 1) this is the first time social networkers themselves have spoken out about protecting their own privacy, and 2) Facebook is in the headlines instead of MySpace! Within about two days of protests, Facebook announced it would soon be giving users more control over their info (though users who had the strictest privacy settings turned on weren't in news feeds), the Washington Post reported), and on Friday announced the new features, a San Francisco Chronicle blog reported). But before mainstream news outlets picked it up, the story was in campus newspapers nationwide. Here's a sampler: at the University of Wisconsin, "Facebook users strike back"; at Indiana, "Facebook updates 'creepy'"; and at Virginia, "Don't feed the monster."