Before the December 2009 privacy settings upgrade, Facebook had a privacy feature that allowed users to hide friends from everyone including friends. Not anymore.
How can Facebook offer a security/privacy feature and then take it away quietly with not so much as a warning? Your friends list can still be hidden but only from non-friends. There is no more an option to keep it hidden from all contacts.
Facebook’s page on facebook.com says: “Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.”
What power? The power to decide what i wish to share with whom has been taken away! And, facebook is not making "the world open and connected" by exposing a user’s entire contacts list to all his contacts. It is just making facebooking more unsafe than it already is. From disgruntled employees to jealous colleagues to repulsive hari sadus of the world, from obsessive ex-spouses to bitter ex-lovers, from resentful students of teachers to weirdos to bores, it’s a free for all. With a little re(!)Search, anyone can insidiously start harassing your family and friends or badmouthing you to anyone in your friends list. Insidious, because one often doesn’t know who in his or her friends list is harboring what kinds of feelings.
On Facebook’s site governance page, users cite the above and many more genuine, troubling and sometimes scary effects of this move. But, i’m not sure if anyone with any say in facebook is even reading discussions on their own site governance page. Perhaps, users have just hit a wall here. Or, more likely, facebook is deliberately ignoring this security concern for higher profits.
For more on how the removal of this option is affecting users, check out ‘hide friends lists’ discussion on ‘facebook site governance’ page:
Facebook.com/topic.php?topic=12295&post=69332&uid=69178204322#post69332
To net the work or not to net the work
This reminds me of orkut. Quite a few years back, most serious social networkers migrated en masse from orkut to facebook because of privacy concerns and cad crowd in the former. Most never went back even when the privacy settings were enhanced. Facebook was seen as the platform for genuine users with genuine networks. But, that was then.
More recently, facebook has been found wanting in the same contexts though on a different level -- unstable security features and influx of the cad crowd. I wouldn’t be surprised if facebook too eventually heads the orkut way. I’ll miss Facebook or not. Because usually, in what is typical of social networking sites, individuals in various interlinked personal networks migrate almost simultaneously in the mass exodus.
There is probably another business in beta raring to displace facebook. But, most social networking portals eventually hit the same wall. It is inherent in the way they are built and intrinsic to the way they make money.
For now, online professional and business networks such as linkedin and spoke, because of their very nature, seem to be the only spaces that allow you yours without getting in your hair.