Facebook 'News Feed' Angers Members

Something very interesting happened on Facebook this week. The popular college social networking site introduced a feature that takes information from members' sites and delivers it headline-news-style to people in their networks.

A new twist for 9 million-member site, but the newsworthy thing is how Facebook members reacted. They didn't like it. Within hours of the feature's unveiling on Monday, protest groups formed online and hundreds of thousands joined.

Yan Fu, a George Washington University freshman, told the Washington Post "it's kind of stalker-ish," and said he now thinks twice before posting anything to his Facebook page because "everybody can read it."

The reaction signals that young people who have embraced social networking sites like Facebook to stay in close contact with friends may not want all the eyes on their lives that they invite.

Facebook's chief executive Mark Zuckerberg responded to members' concerns, but reaffirmed the move on the company blog: This is information people used to dig for on a daily basis, nicely reorganized and summarized so people can learn about the people they care about.

He noted that Facebook has privacy settings that allow users to control who sees what information. Pages on the strictest settings would not be included in the news feeds, he said, noting that the news feed collects only information that people have already allowed to be viewed publicly.

The irony is the personal information picked up by the news feed is already put out into a public venue by Facebook members. But knowing that someone else may present their information in a different, attention-getting way may spark college kids to think more about what they are posting and who is seeing it.

Then, maybe they'll take a closer look at privacy settings and use them.

Update: Facebook announced it will give members more control over what kind of information is sent to their friends in their social network, and will continue to refine privacy settings. Check out Robin Raskin's take on the privacy uproar and Facebook's quick response.