Introduction: The News Feed and mini-feed options for the popular social networking site, Facebook, launched in 5 Sept 2006, presumably after initial internal beta testing has been completed. Facebook comments about the news feed as follows:
"News Feed highlights what's going on in and around your Facebook network by listing the latest stories about your friends on your Facebook home page. You will only be notified of actions that you would have been able to see by clicking around the site. We also display external news articles that might be of interest to you. It's like we started delivering the mail to you instead of forcing you to pick it up on your own."
There has been recent controversy, evident by the number of "anti News Feed" groups launched on Facebook, that has called for an end to the News Feed feature for "fear of privacy". Based on the nonresponse and selection bias effects, the proportion of Facebook users that are "anti News Feed" is overrepresented via these social groups. Although the percentage, or a rough estimate, of the number of Facebook users opposing the new feature is difficult to measure or quantify, for the purposes of this study, we will assume a "reasonable proportion" in both the "for" and "against" camps, with a large amount of nonresponse bias.
Abstract: The privacy concerns over the news feed feature are overstated, for the following reasons. a) The security level of the news feed is identical to that of the previous "no news feed" implementation, with only an increase in the accessibility of the information, b) potential "stalkers" are focused on one Facebook user target, and so are not helped or hurt by the new procedures based on a constant level of security, and c) (although not a privacy concern) The ability to minimize the feed and the mini-feed window removes the "feature bloat" effect that is often criticized.
A) The security level of the news feed is identical to that of the previous "no news feed" implementation.
Facebook states that "You will only be notified of actions that you would have been able to see by clicking around the site." If there are no other vulnerabilities of the News Feed feature, such as unauthorized database access, then the level of security would, by deduction, remain the same.
B) Potential "stalkers" are focused on one Facebook user target, and so are not helped or hurt by the new procedures based on a constant level of security.
Stalking is defined in Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalking) as "repeated harassment or other forms of invasion of a person's privacy in a manner that causes fear to its target." The article continues in this sense, describing the target as a single person. As the security level of the site has not changed, stalkers can, and will, continue to access the profiles of their victims, and disabling the News Feed feature would not hamper this ability. As for ease of recognition (of the target's activities), since the affected target is often a single person or a very small group, the probability of the victim(s) revealing sensitive information has not increased with the implementation of the News Feed feature. (As a side effect, the probability might even decrease, as the victim's perception that his/her privacy may be affected by the News Feed feature may cause him/her to more likely withhold private information, even though the danger is a "false positive". Please refer to the Placebo Effect.)
C) The ability to minimize the feed and the mini-feed window removes the "feature bloat" effect that is often criticized.
Stepping out of security considerations, the ability to minimize the feed window, an inherent ability of Facebook's interface, helps significantly with reducing feature bloat, another possible criticism of the News Feed feature. Those that believe that the News Feed feature is too "distracting" can choose to minimize the window.
Conclusion: No decrease in privacy has resulted from the implementation of the News Feed feature. The possibility of "feature bloat" is significantly reduced by the dynamic nature of the Facebook interface. The only other consideration would be an excessive use of CPU and memory load on Facebook's servers, although Facebook's implementation of the feature without first conducting public interest surveys suggests that they do not perceive server load to be a significant problem.
