For those of you who don't use Facebook, the online community site had an interesting controversy last week. A new feature called The Feed was added. Now, on your front page, every action taken by any of your friends was displayed. In other words, every time you made a new friend, left a comment, uploaded a picture, changed your status, or sneezed, it would now aggregate onto all of your friend's homepages -- everyone would know.
The Facebookers hated the feature. Within a couple days, 800,000 had joined a group protesting the Feed. Soon after, controls were added so users could opt out of aggregation. Like a good contrarian, however, I have a piece up in Campus Progress defending the Feed on online privacy grounds: It was supportable precisely because it finally drove home how public our actions are. The Feed didn't offer access to new information, it just made the access we had more obvious. With no illusions, folks would have been more careful and cautious in what they did or didn't do. Now they won't be. And it's a shame. Anyway, the piece is here, give it a read.
