Have you been paying attention lately to the little things Facebook is doing on your behalf? Have you noticed the helpful suggestions on the right side of the page, reminding you that you haven’t talked to so-and-so in ages and you really should send them a message? Have you noticed the plaintive little messages that so-and-so only has 16 friends, can’t you please suggest some people he or she might know?
It’s not enough to provide a platform for us to connect, now the site wants to play cruise director.
I was talking with a coworker today who asked if I had noticed some other things, some of which I had and some I hadn’t. My coworker said that people she barely knows are getting messages stating that she wants to connect with them – messages she hadn’t sent. I haven’t personally observed this, so I don’t know if this is actually Facebook, or some third-party entity at work, but if anything like that is really happening that’s way too assertive.
Here’s one I discovered myself. If someone posts a picture that has me in it, and tags me, that photo will show up not only in their photo gallery, but also in mine. Get that? Someone else posts a photo, and it shows up in my gallery just because they tagged it with my name on it.
What could possibly go wrong here?
What if you deliberately kept your photo gallery empty because you didn’t want strangers seeing pictures of you online? What if someone posts a picture that isn’t even of you, but tags you in it as a joke? There it is, in your gallery. And finally, worse-case scenario. What if somebody Photoshops a picture of you, to be funny, or embarrassing, or even lewd? There it is, in your photo gallery, even though you had nothing to do with it. And here comes Mr. Corporate Recruiter, considering you for a position with his company and checking your background, and he sees the silly image your “friend” posted, sitting right there in the middle of your photo gallery.
There’s probably a way to go into your privacy settings and prevent all these dire scenarios, I still need to check. But if so, that’s in keeping with recent FB practice – let’s go ahead and make the change and force the users to adjust their settings if they don’t like what we’re doing.
I know you can “remove yourself” from a picture. When you do that, it prevents anyone from adding you back to the picture. One of my wife’s sisters posted one of one of the other sisters from her teenage years and they went through this.
As for playing cruise director, you’re right. My wife started getting messages from her sisters to get on Facebook because they kept getting messages to talk to her because she hadn’t been on in a while. Way too creepy. Hello, Julie McCoy (The Love Boat).
Well, inevitably FB now has third parties that enjoy phishing people’s accounts, just like good ol MySpace. I am constantly getting messages from people that have videos or photos attached that prompt me to open the link! I just click the report spam button.
As for the photos and being tagged in them..FB will let you know when you have been tagged in a photo and will post it on your wall. If it is a bad photo, then hopefully you will catch it before too many people have the chance to take a look. You can remove tags, fortunately!
All in all, I think Facebook just wants to keep users interacting with one another, so it is prompting people to connect. Although, it is a great tactic…I think that the prompts should be a little more targeted. After all, I think we all know that not everyone on your friend list is someone that you want to randomly drop in to say hello to! Just saying…