Hoya Staff Writer Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Hundreds of Georgetown students have joined petitions protesting changes to Facebook that make it easier for users to track their friends’ recent activity, prompting the Web site to give students more control over privacy settings. The changes, which took effect Sept. 5, provide a News Feed on users’ main pages notifying them of their friends’ recent activity, including profile changes, wall posts and new friendships. Students can also track their friends’ recent changes in the Mini-Feed, which appears on each user’s home page. Users around the nation have objected that personal information that used to take greater effort to find is now the first thing that their friends will see upon logging in to Facebook. Jakob Rieken (SFS ’07) began a Facebook group called “We Hate the New Facebook Facelift” immediately after seeing the changes. The group has over 1,349 members from networks all over the nation. “I know your privacy is affected if you use social networking sites, but I think this takes it over the top,” Rieken said. Well over 500 Georgetown students have joined the largest anti-New Feed group, “Students against Facebook News Feed (Official Petition to Facebook),” created by a student at Northwestern University. The group was approaching 750,000 members last night. But not everybody hates Facebook’s new look. Charlie Harrington (COL ’08) created the group “I love the new Facebook” in response to the hordes of detractors. Only 61 members have joined his group. Facebook founder and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg is “really revolutionizing the social networking industry with these changes,” Harrington said. “It’s a way to stream information, and this is set up beautifully where you’re streaming information from so many sources.” Facebook has recently taken steps to improve privacy settings in response to the uproar, but many students feel that they are insufficient. On Friday, three days after the Facebook unveiled the News Feed and Mini-Feed, Zuckerberg announced that users would be able to control, within limits, which information the News Feed and Mini-Feed report. “It seemed like a good short-term solution,” Rieken said, adding that users should have more control to prevent certain information from appearing on their Mini-Feeds. Users still have no way to prevent the Mini-Feed from announcing that they have added information to their profiles, posted photos or joined groups; they must delete those updates individually. Users also may not restrict which information about their friends appears on their News Feeds. In the meantime, many students have written their own codes to remove blocks of information from the Mini-Feed. The codes have been posted on the message boards and walls of the anti-feed groups. A Facebook press release did not reveal plans for any future changes to the News Feed and Mini-Feed in the near future, except to say that “the company will continue to incorporate user feedback into its development process.” Phone calls to the Facebook Corporation were not returned. Although actions that Facebook considers public, like signing walls, adding profile information and posting photos, are now visible for all friends to see, Facebook has stressed that “private interactions” will remain unseen. Those actions include poking, messaging, viewing profiles and photos and rejecting and removing friends, among others. Harrington said that if the changes were accompanied by the recent privacy options, students would not become so upset. “They’ve made this big step and they did it way too quickly and it scared people,” Harrington said, “whereas if they had slowly implemented it . people would be all over it right now.” Zuckerberg wrote an open letter to users Friday apologizing for introducing the News Feed and Mini-Feed without initially including privacy settings, only two days after writing a letter acknowledging the backlash against the changes. But he did not mention further changes to the new features. “I really don’t like the fact that both of his letters . say pretty much, `We’re sorry that so many of you don’t like this, but we’re pretty sure you’ll learn to like it,'” said Luke Hillman (COL ’08), who also created an anti-feed Facebook group. Rieken said that the uproar has demonstrated the power of the Internet and social networking Web sites. “If there’s a lesson in this thing, it’s that it’s really easy to mobilize people on the Internet and it should be used more,” he said.

CORRECTION: In the article “Facebook News Feed Riles GU Web Surfers” (THE HOYA, Sept. 12, 2006, A1) Jakob Rieken (SFS ’07) founded the group “Mini-Feed Is the Dumbest Thing Facebook has ever created,” which had its peak at 230 members. Luke Hillman ( COL ’08) founded the group “We Hate the New Facebook Facelift.”