By: Karla Escolas
“I am away from my computer right now”
Facebook’s controversial privacy issue regarding friend’s “news feeds” has made its way to Myspace. For over a year users have been able to view details about the recent activities of their friends: who is friends with whom, messages left on each other’s walls, etc. The first time I saw this I thought, “I wonder what this says about me?” Well, if you’ve logged into your Myspace account today you were probably prompted with an alert that you can subscribe to keep up-to-date with about 40 of your friends’ every move, including when they update their page, add new photos or music & post blog entries. The good thing about this is Myspace actually informs you of this and gives clear instructions on how to opt out of it. Facebook has never asked me if I wanted this removed, and although you can go into your preferences and change it, I found it a bit of a pain to actually do it.
New Myspace Friend Updates: Although it’s not often talked about, Myspace and Facebook were not the first to give you an option to keeping up with your friends. If you use an instant message service like AOL’s AIM you could actually specifically inform your friends of your every move in your Away Message, such as “In the other room, brb”, “getting ready to go out, cell me!”, “upstairs back in 15”, etc. The obsession and with curiosity of knowing everything has always existed; it’s just that now we are less “in control” of it. After hearing about Facebook’s plans to possibly place your Facebook profile picture next to a product you purchased, a friend of mine said he didn’t even want to sign into his Facebook account again. Not because he often goes on secret shopping sprees but because it just seems like he has no control over what is being said about him.
Are our actions being over-publicized and is it out of our control? In case you were wondering, Chitika will gladly let you what we are up to. You can find out right here on The Chitika Blog and in our forum Chitika SPHERE. Feel free to subscribe; we don’t mind 🙂