Social Network Privacy poll

Some social network sites offer the feature for users to see who has visited their profile (footsteps).

Orkut for example introduced footsteps some time ago. A user is able to opt out of this feature (so she doesn’t leave footsteps anymore and can browse other people’s profiles anonymously), but if she opts out she also can’t see other people’s footsteps on her profile anymore. This resulted in many Orkut users creating second dummy accounts that they used to browse anonymously, while footsteps are still enabled on the user’s real account.

Would you see a problem if a social network site has footsteps enabled by default, and the user can opt out (to not leave footsteps anymore) but would still see other people’s footsteps on her profile (as long as those people didn’t opt out)?

What do you think?

6 thoughts on “Social Network Privacy poll

  1. I think footprints are a nice thing but e.g. Xing has something similar but you can only see the footprints if you are a premium user which is a motivation for many users I guess.
    On the other hand people are sometimes shy to visit the profile of a premium user because they know that they will leave a footprint. Xing has no option do deactivate this because I guess all people would do so to anonymously surf the profiles.

    I think it’s more a culture thing and depends on the social network. When it comes to business (Xing, LinkedIn) or “love” (e.g. Orkut) people are carefull/shy and when this would be in myspace (is it already?) the people won’t care or even would like to leave footprints.

    Anyway, the most footprints are collected by Google but no one knows what they are doing with it as they are not social ;)

  2. I don’t think people should be able to see who views their “public” profile. If they want their profile to be private, and only viewable to friends/family, they should be able to select that option.

  3. actually i liked it for a while even though imho it slows down the usage of social networks, as people get shy/wont visit the site of someone anymore. actually most networks dont use it anymore. xing is a german example and i think its counterproductive, thats just my personal 2 cents.

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