Why It Is A Good Thing That Facebook Monitors Whose Profile You Look At

I read a rather fussy article by Nick Douglas on ValleyWag today entitled, Facebook employees know what profiles you look at.  The story received 1500+ Diggs and I have to agree with the with the response made by the first commenter of the article, walkngonawire:  “In other shocking news, librarians can see which books you’ve checked out at the library, and bank tellers can see where you’ve spent money recently!”

When you sign up for a social network, send emails from your place of employment, or even sign up for a free e-mail account with Hotmail, Yahoo!, or Windows Live Mail, then you should expect that you’re being monitored in some form.  Let’s say that some terrorists had a GMail account and a Facebook account and used both web communication forms to conspire with other terrorist friends, I could only hope that Google and Facebook reacts somehow.  If not, I would say that it would be negligence on their part if they just sat there.

Scenario: let’s say that Johnny Appleplum was a stalker of a Jenny Orangebanana.  Johnny and Jenny have never never met before and Johnny is known to be not right in the head because he sends threatening messages to a Jenny saying how much he needs Jenny.  If I was Jenny, I would only hope that Facebook was tracking any further suspicious activity from Johnny because you never know what Internet creeps are capable of. 

However, one of the comments that Douglas made in his blog post to clarify what Facebook employees are capable of is:

The only ones who have full access to profile information is security staff and higher ups.  Seems like a fair check-and-balance.

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