Last Friday, TODAY newspaper wrote some articles about Facebook which I felt wasn’t well researched or persuasive enough. At least not for me. It read like the usual fear-mongering of online tools that journalists spout.

(If you’d like to read, it’s on TODAY, Aug 25, pg 40. Download a scan here 8.5mb)

In the first article, “Face This Facts”, by Hedirman Supian, the argument for identity theft is quite weak.

The creators of Facebook want its users to model their relationships in cyberspace on those which they have in the real world… In fact, if you misrepresent yourself on Facebook, it’s a ‘violation’ of the company’s policy.

The author seems to dislike the fact that Facebook doesn’t allow yourself misrepresent yourself. That is, you have to present your true self in your online identity.

The problem I find with this argument is that it is not well researched vis-a-vis the privacy features Facebook has versus the privacy features that other social networks have.

The information that you reveal on Facebook is entirely voluntary. The only thing that you must reveal is your name. Otherwise, you can choose to reveal your contact, email, work, location information on a granular vountary basis. You can even opt your profile out of the search feature. That to me is one of the most mature, if not the best permissions systems available on the Internet. We don’t even have to mention the weak privacy features available on competitors like MySpace or Friendster.

One good place to draw insight onto the privacy features of Facebook is from U.N.C PhD Candidate Fred Stutzman. Fred was one of the first in academia to start studying the impact of Facebook. Back in the days when Bjorn and I were doing our thesis in Blogging and Social Networks, we regularly reviewed his materials.

One thing he pointed out was that Facebook was one of the safest and most trusted social networks. Because in the early days of its development, identity on Facebook is equated to identity in the real-world. This arose because Facebook grew out of college communities which were essentially strong social networks themselves.

Facebook was initially a tool that college students used to connect with each other. This encouraged authentic identity building on Facebook because if someone posted false information, they would be immediately called out on that by their college mates.

Authenticity became the social compact of the fledging social network and as it grew and grew into all the colleges stateside it continued to hold true. It is definitely not 100% but it is definitely much more authentic than MySpace or even Friendster.

Hence, counter to Hedirman’s argument that this is naive and dangerous, the fact is that this is a marked improvement over the networks that came before this. By encouraging authentic identity, it is also a barrier to entry for potential predators.

Of course, I have to admit that one of the problems stems from Facebook opening up to all-and-sundry joining. The demographics of Facebook has indeed changed significantly, with a lot more ‘senior’ people joining and trying to find out what the fuss is. But for many of them, especially those who simply set up profiles without opting to join any networks, they are like lost sheep in a sea of authenticity.

The frame of thought that goes into myself revealing information on Facebook actually begins at the point of knowing which network a person is from. The highest amount of information is revealed only to close friends and people from my trusted corporate and university networks. For people in generic geographic or no-networks, my settings are such that I do not reveal my phone number.

(Btw, Facebook also has extremely sensitive anti-crawling features that are easily triggered off even if you started accessing lots of friend profiles manually. They will not hesitate to block the accounts of people found trying to crawl and spider the site for identity information. Hence it can be very very difficult to gather information across the network. Its walled-garden approach is definitely the jewel in its crown on strategies.)

The other argument in the article is that Facebook is a blackhole for working hours. We’ve all heard this before when the Internet first came out, when Geocities first came out, when IM first came out, when social networks first came out, when blogs first came out…

Indeed, every technology that is so good it becomes addictive and sucks away productivity. I can’t deny it, but it is not to say that the technology doesn’t have its merits. Socialization is necessary in today’s world and the features behind Facebook being one of the best social software that fosters social interactions is something that would take me another blog post to write.

But for companies, it is indeed wise to block off such tools or make them less conveniently accessible from the employee’s desk. One management strategy would be to put a computer located in a public area such as the pantry specially enabled for people to check their myspace/facebook/blogs or whatever. This would allow the use but sandbox it such that it becomes socially inappropraite to use it for too long. In a public area like the pantry, others are watching and the peer pressure would immediately discourage employees from spending too much time away from their work.

Lastly, the argument that Facebook is the ultimate “spambook” is thoroughly false because of the fact that you can turn off all the email notifications in your settings panel. I have since done so and I’m no longer bothered by lots of email notifications from Facebook. It is thoroughly more productive for me to simply log into Facebook every now and then and clear out all the messages, wallposts and what not in one sitting.Face The Facts? Debunking the Myths some journalists have of Facebook