It’s almost become natural for me. Whenever I open my Google Chrome, I click the address bar, type “f”, and hit enter. Chrome automatically fills in my most visited site, facebook.com, and sends me there. And before you make any judgment on whether or not that action is justified or not, there are plenty of good reasons why people today need Facebook.
Remember when Facebook was nothing but people’s profiles and a wall? Today’s Facebook has become so much more. From News Feed to Facebook Video Chat, the company has constantly updated their product in such a way to attract more users: by making Facebook more and more useful for everyone. And as Facebook becomes more useful, the less it can be regarded as a time-waster—a frivolous website unnecessary for any productive work. A number of recently introduced tools actually make Facebook somewhat necessary in today’s world: Messages, Groups, Photos, etc. (One could also argue that the world has just evolved to rotate around Facebook, but that’s another discussion entirely.)
As Facebook’s usefulness grows, so will concerns about privacy. No longer can you join a group at Princeton University, without providing to Facebook your Princeton email address and netID. You can’t utilize any of Facebook’s offers without revealing to Facebook what you enjoy buying. You can’t even stalk another person without letting Facebook know that you’re interested in knowing more about that person. (Try it yourself: go view the Timeline of a friend you don’t see on your News Feed, then see how often his/her posts show up.)
And to take it to another level, some of Facebook’s options are made to purposefully “stalk” you.
Who has ever used any of Facebook’s mobile apps to post a status or reply to a message? If so, you may have unwittingly revealed your location to the company. Sure, this problem can be solved by turning off Facebook’s ability to access your location, but for the legions of people in the world who don’t know how to do so, they are essentially allowing Facebook to track their movements around the globe.
Of course, this was all a part of Facebook’s plan. They want you to use their service, to give information to them. How many study groups have been formed on Facebook’s servers; how many conversations have been conducted over Messages; how many check-ins has Facebook gotten you to willingly share with them?
By marrying a useful tool with a privacy invading default option, Facebook knows what it’s doing. And Facebook knows that its tools are too useful for the mass majority of users such that most will not leave the site, no matter what they do. The burden is placed on the user to carefully control his/her privacy while also taking advantage of everything Facebook has to offer them. And so far, this only applies to what a user posts about himself; it does not even cover any other things one’s friends may do. It comes close to being an evil diabolical plot to track and dominate the lives of everyone in the world, except for Facebook’s promise to keep all of the information private. (Sidenote: At least it’s better than China’s state-approved 人人网.)
Thus, the next time you go and stalk someone else on Facebook, just remember that Facebook is stalking you right back.