Can you imagine dating in the days before Google? How would you find out anything about your counterpart? I wish I could take credit for the idea, but I have to admit I got it from my friends. Today, it’s not uncommon for someone to “google” the person they have just started seeing, or perhaps have been set up to meet with on a blind date. (Luckily, there are so many male engineers with my name, you’d really have to dig to find too much about me on the internet other than this blog – I know because I’ve tried!)
I’ve also heard a lot of people talk about this idea of “on-line stalking” – from “fingering” an email user to see if the recipient has read your email yet or not (no, the reason he didn’t reply to your email is not because he hasn’t read it yet) to looking up people’s profiles on any one of today’s “social network” websites such as Friendster.
Friendster is a great way to look up people from your past – from old classmates to ex-boyfriends – to see where they are and what they are doing, without necessarily having to have the awkward small-talk-catch-up conversation. Until very recently, you could only see how many times your profile had been viewed by others, but not who had viewed your profile. Then Friendster changed that by making those logs available to users - and set the option to allow others to see that you’ve viewed their profile (i.e. not anonymous) as the default setting. They did all this without giving their users any notice.
Not being an avid Friendster user, I almost never sign on or update my profile, but those who do, do so almost religiously. In some sense, it really does give users a method to “on-line stalk” others. Gradually, users started to notice the link that said “Click here to see who has viewed your profile” and realized that their anonymity had been compromised. It didn’t seem like such a big deal when I first heard about it, but realized that for avid users, this was actually a big deal. The big deal was not that you now had the option to let others know you’d viewed their profile, it was that Friendster had made that choice for the user, and set it as the default setting. And since no notice had been given, people felt as though their privacy had been violated.
Now, what I don’t understand is this – I thought the whole point of Friendster was to view each other’s profiles and thereby make friends? So why be shy about looking at others’ profiles? Having said that, I signed on to Friendster for the first time in a while and turned off the option allowing others to see when I have viewed their profile…