In his column yesterday in the New York Times, When Everyone’s a Friend, Is Anything Private?, Randall Stross explored what he calls the Law of Amiable Inclusiveness and its growing practice on Facebook. He observed that the average number of "friends" on Facebook has grown from 100 to 120 in the past few months as more people routinely accept friend requests, even from people they don't know.
I've found I am moving in that direction as well. When I first joined Facebook I only accepted friend invitations from people I had met, and occasionally sent replies to those I didn't recognize asking if we knew each other. After a few of those people reminded me of a conversation, typically at a computer industry event, I adopted a more permissive attitude, usually looking at whether we have any friends in common. This heuristic is obviously vulnerable to serial frienders, but then it's only Facebook so who really cares?
Stross goes on to describe the debate between people who think Facebook's default privacy settings are too loose and those who point out that if users really cared they could change the settings. Since most don't bother, he concludes that with the concept of "friend" being so all-inclusive, it seems pointless to distinguish between private and public.
I draw a somewhat different conclusion. Most of the information people post on Facebook is innocuous if not downright uninteresting to anyone but one's real friends. This is especially true now that Facebook's membership has been open to the post-college crowd who presumably have settled down to less colorful private lives. Still, it seems creepy to some people that a total stranger would be interested in such things, and puzzling that more Facebook posters aren't concerned. (Obviously they haven't been watching much "reality" television.) One way people that people can be made to feel more comfortable with the potential exposure is to limit it somehow, even if that limitation is arbitrary. The requirement that people had to be in one's "network" to see one's profile is one such safeguard, as if one was safer if the person looking at the profile was from the same town. (Personally, I would be more concerned about being stalked by someone in my own town than someone a continent away.) The requirement that someone be a "friend" may serve a similar purpose. Even though these friends may not be people one has actually met, there is at least some semblance of control, which is good enough for most people.
