Fundamental Friday: Facebook Privacy: Who is Stalking Me?

In the past two weeks, the number of notifications for stalking applications promising to reveal those secret lurkers who hold on to my every written word have increased. Fortunately, I am well aware of the number of lurkers: ZERO. I am a rather boring person. Therefore, it is easy to overlook this application. However, many people lead interesting lives and it is always fun to see your analytics. It is the newest trend. Hence, the websites such as About.me, which accumulate and publish data of views and interest level of your online presence.

How do these stalking facebook applications work?
When you accept an application, unless every one of your friends has approved the identical app, tracking is not available for profile views. Even then, there is a nominal chance for this feature to work seamlessly. Most of the apps have the capability of pulling your friends’ names and pictures. This gives the illusion of tracking. The program just creates a random image from your friends’ list and number for views to satiate curiosity.  Each time you use the app, it could record your false stalking result, so there is continuity each time you use the program.

“But Emma, my ex-girlfriend was on my profile twenty times!  It has to be true!”  Well, Niels Bohr said that the observer can affect the experiment. Maybe you can apply this to your random result as well?  Why not? However, until you can prove that your mind can control results of randomly generated numbers, then, you may just want to delete the application.   Either way, it does not give you the feedback you wanted.

People do not feel comfortable with a public profile tracking feature and tend to browse less when this specification is enabled on sites. Facebook wants to encourage traffic to many parts of the site.  FB is tracking for its own private purposes, but it is only to know habits and patterns of demographics. I guess you are special enough to be tracked by FB  just like everyone else.

Just another rambling session,

Emma Moore