Facebook: Will you be my friend?

  • Article

This is a question many of you will be asked if you know people who use Facebook. For some requests it's really straight forward as they are someone you socialise with and regard as a friend.

What about if a work colleague asks to be your friend?

What's the downside of just adding them anyway? Well as far as I can see in doing so you are enabling them to browse the profiles of all your existing Facebook friends and to see all kinds of interesting things including:

  • which groups they join
  • what their "status" is - these are like twitter messages reflecting what people are up to - at the moment mine states "Steve is reflecting upon how nice it was to go for a walk in the sunshine at lunchtime"
  • which facebook applications they add or remove
  • what's on their wall - this is a message area that any friends can post to, all can read

Friends can of course see your "status" updates too.

Facebook DOES provide the facility for only granting people a limited subset of access - it's termed a "limited profile" and with it you can specify which of the following items such people have access to:

    • Basic Info
    • Contact Info
    • Personal Info
    • Education Info
    • Work Info
    • Wall
    • Photos Tagged of Me
    • Videos Tagged of Me
    • Online Status
    • Status Updates
    • Friends
    • Posted Items
    • Notes
    • Groups

The thing is that if I give you the default full access (as most people seem to) then you get the same level of access as I do to my friends - if they gave me full access then you'll get it too hence you can snoop on them.

I think you have to treat any information you put into social networking sites as being in the public domain and that you should be careful what you share to protect your privacy.