Privacy vs. Curiosity

The best thing about Facebook is the ability that it gives you to watch others without their knowledge. This is a somewhat hypocritical feeling however, as most users, myself included, would love nothing more than to know who is frequenting their profile while at the same time enjoy the anonymity gifted to us while we innocently (or not so innocently) browse the profile of someone we fancy, dislike, are jealous of or are just generally interested in.
We simply can’t have it both ways, so which is better?
I believe we would all (deep down) prefer the privacy factor…

Amidst rumors of a new Facebook application which allowed users to view and display the top five other fb users that view their profile the most frequently, I did some digging as this rather bothered me. Not because I often spend large amounts of time on particular people’s profiles because I want to track their movements and begin some serious illegal stalking, but because I still believed that if this were application were real, some people may have been surprised to see my name pop up on theirs. This is because, and I’m not sure if I’m alone in this, the people whose profiles I visit the most are not my close friends but slightly more removed contacts who I’m not in regular contact with and therefore are not already aware of what they’re up to, this makes them far more intriguing to me. I hope that doesn’t sound too ‘stalkery’.
However my mind was put at ease when I discovered a comment on Facebook’s Help Centre which confronted this question by saying that no such application was allowed by Facebook and that if anything similar ever eventuated it would be quickly removed.
According to the Help Centre this kind of application would simply be a breech of policy and anyone who comes across a ‘dodgy’ application should report it to speed up the process.
I urge everyone to do this for dignities sake.

This subject brings up the debate about the difference between simply killing boredom by trolling a random profile and the act of stalking. For some, the former can quite easily slip into the latter.
In actuality there really isn’t a lot preventing someone from viewing your profile if they are determined.
Even if there is someone who you have not accepted as a ‘friend’, it is likely they will know someone who knows you and allows them to view you from their account. The only real way to counter this would be to limit you contacts list to close friends that you are in contact with on a regular basis that you trust implicitly not to allow anyone else to abuse their Facebook account. According to the Dunbar Number this would mean that we would only have around 5 friends. How many of us would let that happen? Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of Facebook?

Perhaps we should all just accept the nature of Facebook for what it is, in Mark Zuckerberg’s words “The age of innocence is over.” Besides surely if you’re that worried about someone wanting to stalk/kill you…DON’T have Facebook!?