I had many fears in college. Failing exams. Cockily drinking myself to death some brazen Saturday night. Showing up dateless to the Mid-Term-Survivors Ice Cream Social (shudder). But my biggest fear was not overt. My biggest fear twirled lazily ’round the back of my mind, its mere possibility always terrifying, though it never quite seemed to come to pass. The biggest fear? That some how, some way, unbeknownst to me, other Instant Messenger users could find out how many times I checked their profiles/away messages.

OK, OK, maybe it wasn’t my biggest fear, but certainly it was the most nagging. With all the AIM hacks floating about the InterWeb, surely someone must have come up with few lines of code that recorded whenever someone looked at your profile. But, surprisingly, I never came across such a hack, and if ol’ computer geek me didn’t know of one, then the mass general population of college AIM users certainly didn’t know about it, and so I could breathe easy whilst I maniacally checked, rechecked, and checked again on the Away Messages and Buddy Profiles of my signed on friends.

It was an addiction. I’d sit at my desk, text book spread out in front of me, and study to the flickering glow of my computer monitor. Read a page, click through the away messages. Read a page, flick through the away messages. I was always well aware of how completely crazy I’d look if anyone was ever able to see the tally of my checking on their profile: “13 times in two hours?! What a freak!” And if I had a crush on some girl? Well, then, my obsessive checking would sink past those already pathetic lows.

All this was on my mind when heard about the Facebook’s new “Feed” technology. Essentially, every time a user now signs onto the Facebook they’re greeted with a personalized news feed of what their friend’s have been up to, complete with time and date. The Facebook community is in quite a tizzy about this, setting up petitions against it on, what else ,the Facebook. But it all seemed pretty innocuous to me: “John has updated his favorite songs list.” Or, “Rachel and Frank have broken up.” Eh, no biggie, I thought. After all, if you went into your list of friends it already highlighted those profiles that have recently been updated.

But I signed in to my own Facebook account today to see what all the fuss was about and, suddenly, I felt my safe little cyber-world crashing down around me. There, in my mini-feed, sat the following update: “Erin is stalking you on facebook.”

Gulp.

Erin, it turns out, is a girl who knows another girl I know. We’re acquaintances in real life, though not officially “friends” on the Facebook. Erin had, as far as I can deduce, viewed my profile a few times recently, and Facebook was alerting me to this fact…

My God. It was everything I feared. My mind reeled with all the profiles I’d viewed on Facebook in the past few months. The beauty of the Facebook, its killer app, if you will, is it’s daisy-linking, drag you in technology. A friend leaves a message on your board -> you click to that friend’s profile -> you see a person you met once listed as one of that person’s friends -> you click through and take a gander at that person’s profile. That’s what Social Networking is all about. But, for the love of God, I do not (DO NOT!) want that near-stranger to know I was looking at their profile. I do not want some girl I hooked up with a couple of years ago to know that I still view her profile once in a while to see what she’s up to now. I do not want my High School enemy to know that I was viewing his profile (to gain insight into his weaknesses, no doubt!).

The fact that nobody would want people to be able to track their profile-viewing habits is so abundantly obvious that I am shocked the Facebook created this feature. No longer can we skip carefree through the green valleys of the Facebook social scene. Every move we make is being tracked, categorized, and fed back to other users. The Facebook isn’t fun any more; it’s dangerous.

And so it seems that nagging college fear of mine has finally come into fruition. We can no longer stalk in secret. Like all those AOL users we laughed at , our embarrassing tracking-tendencies are now up on display. I believe the Facebook has really shot themselves in the foot with this one. The “rebellion” has already started. Let’s see how they respond.

UPDATE (9/8/06): Well, that was quick. As this Slashdot article reports, the Facebook team has spent the last few nights feverishly coding away, and now users are able to control which of their actions are “broadcastable” on other people’s news feeds.

This obviously makes me happy (back to stalking in secret!), but from a wider point of view, this compromise is only acceptable if the news feed is shut off by default for users. People should have to opt-in to have their every move broadcast on the Facebook, not opt-out if they don’t. Sure, ol’ Slashdot-reading me will now know enough to go and adjust my Facebook Privacy settings, but will idiot Sorority girls? Will new users of the Facebook, who will just assume that’s the way it works when they sign up? Most computer users don’t even know to turn on Tabbed Browsing in Firefox, and we’re expecting them to delve deep into the Facebook privacy dialogs? Getting better, Facebook, but not a perfect solution by any means…