Facebook responds to protesters by tightening privacy controls

To provide its users more comfort, a social networking service, Facebook, earlier in the week, added two more features to its site. The first was a News Feed and the other was Mini-Feed. These two features were meant to present users with a simple way to see what their friends are up to without jumping from one profile to another, but many Facebook users have disapproved them saying that the new features are exposing their personal profile changes to everyone.

The News Feed feature appears on every user's Welcome page, revealing updates about their friends including relationship status changes, new wall-to-wall messages, and new friend additions, among other things. And, the other added feature is a Mini-Feed which appears on each user’s profile page, listing recent changes to that particular user's profile.

But unhappy with the News Feed feature, that automatically discloses and notifies users whenever a photo is posted by friends or they split up with their boyfriend or girlfriend, the Facebook users revolted and launched a series of impromptu protests. They havee flocked in big numbers to register with groups whose names express the disapprobation with the News and Mini-Feeds. The largest of these groups is called "Students against Facebook News Feed (Official Petition to Facebook)."

"News Feed is just too creepy, too stalker-esque, and a feature that has to go," a statement by the newly formed group states. By Friday night the number of protesters had grew to more than 741,000.

The four days protest came to an end yesterday as the site agreed Friday to let them turn off the new feature that drew privacy concerns.

Facebook's chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg who earlier said the feature is designed to make it easier for friends to keep up to date with each other, said in an open letter to users, “We really messed this one up.”

The feature, however, was meant to help users save time, but Facebook, which earlier estimated the protest, witnessed thousands of users joining protest groups on the site and signing online petitions.

Alarmed with the protest’s affects on the site, Zuckerberg wrote users, "This was a big mistake on our part, and I'm sorry for it. When we launched News Feed and Mini-Feed we were trying to provide you with a stream of information about your social world. Instead, we did a bad job of explaining what the new features were and an even worse job of giving you control of them.” He further added, “But apologizing isn't enough. I wanted to make sure we did something about it, and quickly. So we have been coding nonstop for two days to get you better privacy controls.”

Now, the Palo Alto, California based company has eventually tightened privacy controls for controversial news feed feature, by giving users the choice to eliminate activities they did not want broadcasted over the news feeds, which protesters stated violated their privacy and made them feel like they were being stalked.