Warning: You might want to adjust your privacy settings.
Some friendly advice, as sound as it is shameless, from the good, socially conscientious people labouring away over at College Times. The message makes up part of the pre-amble that accompanies each entry of the site’s Creep of The Week series. For those of you still lolling about in the sweet naïveté of simpler times when your name and likeness were unlikely to be plastered across student websites without your consent, well… Wake up and smell the intrusion.
Just like a Rubix Cube in Mensa, it would be all too easy to get this twisted. College Times’ Creep of The Week updates are by no means the malady, they’re not to blame for creeping, they are merely a symptom of something more societal. The advent of social networking sites has provided all internet-users with an anonymity that allows our inner-voyeur to pulsate and peep its way through the vast swathes of personal info on offer. What the Creep of The Week series does prove, however, is that this idea of invite-only voyeurism is an illusion – and that your privacy settings can only go so far in keeping you protected…
College Times’ Creep of The Week updates are by no means the malady, they’re not to blame for creeping, they are merely a symptom of something more societal.
College Times signs off each and every entry the same way – congratulating the ‘winner’ of Creep of The Week (a prize would be nice, College Times, you are violating their privacy after all) and by encouraging their readers send in their suggestions for next week’s winner/victim. Having done a straw poll of most of the people on my Newsfeed, it’s safe to say that a lot of students have upwards of several hundred Facebook Friends. Even the most precocious social butterflies amongst us would struggle to maintain trusting relationships with the hundreds of Friends we amass. What good are your privacy settings when you don’t know what the people who can see your information plan to do with it? What action is left for you to take? Adjust your settings so that only your meticulously selected group of close friends can see your updates? Pull a Drake and enforce an embargo, middle-finger in the air yelling ‘No New Friends!’? In the words of the great John Giles – not great options, are they?
Even the most precocious social butterflies amongst us would struggle to maintain trusting relationships with the hundreds of Friends we amass.
There is no foolproof way to protect yourself and the information you want to share with the world, short of padlocking your laptop. Once you sign up for Facebook or Twitter, or MySpace for those of you who are trying to bring 2005 back, then you’ve burdened yourself with this reality. It doesn’t seem like a very bitter pill to swallow. Most casual Facebook stalking is done in good faith, nobody can deny that it’s increased the efficiency of your-new-crush research exponentially. It’s a case of a phenomenon so widely accepted, a tactic so readily employed, that it would be foolish, hypocritical and verging on impossible to criticize. That is – when it’s done in good faith. We’ve all had the experience of meeting someone in real life after seeing enough of them on Facebook to know where they went out last week. I believe that there’s an innocence to that element of human curiosity – an unwavering interest in all the faces that fill up our environment. But Facebook is no different to anything else in one respect – there are always those who look to take advantage. Those who aren’t content with letting others be. Those who just have to make everything that bit more difficult…
There are two different kinds of internet creeping, two worlds apart, with differences that are easy to illustrate. The first kind is like making accidental eye contact with a girl in one of your lectures, and spending the rest of your day scrambling around asking all your friends who she is, what kind of music she listens to and if there’s any way you’ll ever be able to talk to her. That’s the equivalent of a chance encounter with somebody you like on a night out and waking up in the morning to scan their profile, going through your checklist to see if they have anything in common with you and hoping you have mutual friends to help you pave the way for a new friendship.
It’s more like hanging from a tree thirty yards from a window with the curtains pulled back, decked out in camouflage with your eyeballs pressed to a set of binoculars so you can watch an attractive person you’ve never met try on clothes.
The second kind of internet creeping, well, it’s an awful lot creepier. It’s more like hanging from a tree thirty yards from a window with the curtains pulled back, decked out in camouflage with your eyeballs pressed to a set of binoculars so you can watch an attractive person you’ve never met try on clothes. Then taking as many photos as you can and slamming them up on every nearby telephone pole with a nail-gun, complete with your stalk-ee’s name, age and place of occupation. That’s College Times creeping, that’s creeping for people who submit the profiles of unknowing people to College Times. To call it Facebook creeping is wrong. Once you start sharing that kind of information with people who have no connection with the person in question, who never would have seen it otherwise, then that’s real.
It seems an easy enough solution, doesn’t it? Adjust your privacy settings. I’m sure the College Times would forgive another suggestion, aimed at, oh, nobody in particular. Don’t be so eager to unashamedly exploit people who aren’t bothered to board their houses up just because you’re outside licking their windows. Some friendly advice.
