Crumlish and Malone's 101 guide to creating social websites contains a great deal of interesting commentary and tools for first time social website designers, and the discussion regarding privacy seems particularly relevant to the issues we see on the Internet today. As I read these parts of the book I had questions regarding how much privacy and what kind of privacy best helps users enjoy their experiences on websites without feeling like they're giving away everything there is to know about themselves and without other users feeling like the website is so guarded that it doesn't actually allow them to know anything about each other. In the meantime this reminded me that Google is essentially mining all of our data and cataloging it, making a huge repository of information that defines our digital selves. They know what we search for, when we search for it, and how often we go to what kinds of sites. At first this seems terribly creepy and unsettling, but in some ways this leads me to my bigger question: would it be useful to have a function like this on a site like facebook that users could access?
I was reminded while reading the section by Danah Boyd regarding Teen Strategies for friending in Crumlish and Malon'es book of the trepidation some of us sometimes have over removing a friend. Boyd notes that some teens find "deleting people discomforting and inappropriate. Penelope, the 15-year-old from Nebraska, says that deleting a Friend is 'rude…unless they’re weird.' Yet while she will do it occasionally, the process of deleting someone is 'scary' to Penelope; she fears that she will offend someone" (470). In contrast other teens like Melanie use the following method: "Melanie’s approach to Facebook is quite unusual. Not only is she willing to call out the absurdity of being Friends online but not talking at school, but she is also willing to buck the norms by rejecting people she does not like and deleting people who annoy her" (470).
After reading these views and the discussion of some of the initial friend thinning facebook users went through after adding people they didn't actually know (something I also did when facebook was new and the idea of reformatting the friend making process and redefining friendship seemed extraordinary) I decided to scan my own friend list and think if there was anyone I could logically delete. I realized the thing that was keeping me from deleting anyone was the thing I didn't and currently couldn't know: who visits my page or looks at my pictures that I'm unaware of? Perhaps this person isn't part of a close ring of friends and doesn't feel comfortable commenting, but would certainly notice if he or she were suddenly cut off from perusing my page. My natural feeling towards this was to empathize with these other potential gawkers and decided to delete no one. The thing I believe that could either help or greatly hurt this situation would be a program that would give me some idea of who looks at my page and what they look at most.
Perhaps for some this would be embarrassing and they would feel a
basic gawking right had been violated if I were able to see if they,
per se, looked at a photo of mine more than my other friends. Yet, at
the same time this would also give us some idea who out of that vague
list of friends who doesn't seem to fit definite social roles in our
lives (acquaintance/ friend/ frenemy/ flirtationship/ etc.) might take
more interest in us than we were originally aware of and would help
inform our decisions of who to delete or who not to delete. In the same
regard, if I looked at a page of a friend whom I never visited and
discovered he or she never visited my site either, my decision would be
easy (a similar scenario where I visit a friend's site I often visited
who didn't return the favor might also make friendship decisions
easier). So, this brings me back to Google and the ideas of privacy and
data mining. Facebook already collects a great deal of data on its
users just as Google does, so why not consider sharing some of that
data with other users to give us all a better idea of the value we
place on our friends through digital mediums. Or is it all just too
creepy?