According to Valleywag, Facebook employees are in the habit of checking out people’s profiles and snooping around to see who certain people have been checking up on. Is this a violation of our privacy? Well, I am not sure, but I had to laugh at the Fake Steve Job’s response,
Some of us are still trying to get our heads around the idea that Valleywag is pretending to be outraged at the idea of someone snooping into the private affairs of other people. I mean, hello? Valleywag? The guys who follow Eric Schmidt around on dates? Man oh man.
That is too funny and so true.
Michael Krigsman from ZDNet is not surprised, but thinks that Facebook should prohibit their employees from doing this. In fact, he compared it to the IRS snooping around people’s tax returns.
Mac Beach thinks that this is a much bigger problem at Facebook. According to Mac Beach, Facebook consistently and pervasively disregards people’s privacy.
I think that Facebook should implement a policy prohibiting employees from doing this. But, I think that the more important thing to gain from this story is an awareness of the privacy concerns that the Internet raises.
We need to be careful about our online activities. Social Networking is great, but it is social. Just like you wouldn’t share certain things with your colleagues at work, you shouldn’t share certain things about yourself on social networking sites. These social networking sites leave a trail on the Internet about you. People can piece together a lot about you by doing a Google search, checking out what pages you Digg, and who your friends are on Facebook and Linkdin.
Tell me about your online privacy concerns.
