Facebook Timeline

The article I chose is called “5 Ways to Secure Your Facebook Profile in a Post-Timeline World.” It was written by Logan Keller on February 7^th of this year. This article is basically about how the new (unfortunate, if I may add) feature called ‘Timeline’ is being used to basically stalk people and find out a lot more about who they communicate with on Facebook and things like that. The author mentions ways to protect a user’s privacy by going to the settings menu and editing your privacy which allows you to control what another user can and cannot see on your profile, such as who can look up your contact info such as phone numbers and e-mail addresses, and which users can see posts by other users on your timeline. This article is pretty much three pages of how to protect yourself and your privacy from having people find out more than they should know about you. I think that this is ridiculous that Facebook pretty much allows this type of invasion of privacy to happen. Over the years, Facebook has allowed people to pretty much trace every move that a user makes. For example, there is this new sidebar located on the right side of the screen that shows every interaction that one of your friends on Facebook makes. If your friend writes on one of their friends’ wall that you are not even friends with, you can hover your cursor over the post and you are able to read your friend’s entire post on their wall, including the time that the post was made. There is also an option for you to “view their friendship” which basically shows you every detail about the person your friend just messaged. This is a dream come true for a boss that is thinking about hiring somebody as they are able to view their Facebook profile, and view everything they have done since the day they created their profile, such as status updates, pictures that have been uploaded, and conversations with other Facebook friends. I think that Facebook took this way too far and needs to remove the Timeline feature.