Facebook’s “News Feed” controversy in 2006 perfectly illustrates this paradox
(as described in boyd and Hargittai 2010; Debatin et al. 2009; Thompson 2008).
The feature broadcasts Friends’ actions from profile changes to application-specific
activities. Although such information had always been present and accessible, the
News Feed highlighted even the most trivial updates, making them immediately
visible, unfiltered, and like all information placed on SNSs, persistent, searchable,
and replicable (Albrechtslund 2008). Such a change is consistent with the difference
between issuing someone a visitor’s pass and sending out an invitation for
viewing one’s information. Perceived as a violation of information control, the
News Feed produced significant backlash. Ten thousand people joined a protest
group by noon of the launch day; the next day that number rose to 284,000, and it
would eventually gain as many as 700,000 members (boyd and Hargittai 2010;
Thompson 2008). While the predictions for Facebook’s future were grim, as
Thompson (2008) reports, “Users’ worries about privacy seemed to vanish within
days, boiled away by their excitement at being so much more connected to their
friends” (p. 8). Sociality prevailed at the expense of privacy, and in fact, Facebook
subsequently experienced a massive growth spurt.