Are Facebook Employees Tracking Our Activity, Silently Judging?

Are Facebook employees perusing our accounts for fun?

Valleywag reported earlier this week that free time over at the social networking site generally involves Facebook workers giggling at our site activities - what profiles we're looking at, how long we stay there, who is rejecting our friend requests, what pithy notes we're writing to long-lost friends, etc.

The blog was also "warned" after requesting more info on whether a Facebook employee logged into someone's account and surreptitiously altered profile information.

Facebook denied any wrongdoing and expressed its love for privacy.

"Facebook respects user privacy and access to site usage and profile information is restricted at the company," a Facebook spokeswoman said in an e-mail this morning. "Any Facebook employees found to be engaged in improper access to user data will be disciplined or terminated."

She didn't elaborate on what constituted "improper access" but let's assume for blog purposes that tracking usage is not improper. If so, I can't say I'm shocked. I don't necessarily expect the same levels of privacy on my Facebook account that I do with my online banking or credit card statements. You don't create a social networking profile to remain anonymous. And call me an unscrupulous stalker, but if seeing what profiles people I knew were looking at was a perk of working of Facebook, I'd definitely be abusing that privilege.





That being said, if Facebook actually intends to one day replace e-mail, allowing its employees to read peoples' message might not be the best way to go. Shouldn't workers be off spending Microsoft's money instead of re-enacting "1984"? Remember Facebook, you too could be one great idea away from becoming the next Friendster.

Speaking of, I remember feeling a sense of panic years ago when Friendster quietly introduced the "who has looked at my profile" feature. Unless you went into your privacy settings and manually clicked a box that made your Friendster activities anonymous, your ex-boyfriend, that kid you ate paste with in kindergarten, you high school nemesis and that hot guy from your freshman year psych lab were now aware that you took the time to search their names and troll their profiles. *Palm slaps forehead*