Surely you will remember it, because only a couple of days ago We told you about the last (for the moment) Facebook failure, a problem that meant that visits to other people’s profiles were automatically converted into friend requests. As I already mentioned at that time, one of the features most valued by many users of this social network is that there was no way of knowing if someone had visited your profile and, therefore, no one could know that you had visited theirs.
It is true that, if we think about it, this has a positive side and a negative side. The positive, of course, is that it protects the privacy of users and their movements through the social network. Of course, this also enhances the use of Facebook, since those responsible for it are very aware, from the outset, that if the steps of users through other people’s profiles were traceable, the use of their network would be reduced more than considerably, which would translate, in turn, in that they could serve much less monetizable content. In other words, they look out for privacy, yes, but also for their own interests.
The bad part is that, of course, this makes it much easier to stalking, although when assessing this we must take into account two factors. The first is that Facebook offers a series of controls that allow you to adjust, in a fairly detailed way, what other users can and cannot see, depending on whether they are strangers, contacts, if they are part of a trusted group, and so on. And the second, even more important, is that we must not forget that we are talking about a social network, that is, a type of service in which the scope of privacy is, to put it kindly, limited.
The problem, however, is that up to now privacy regarding visits to other people’s profiles had worked well, making users trust it. Now, as we can read on Engadget, Facebook has already fixed it and no more friend requests will be sent to the visited profiles, that is to say, that fortunately the service has returned to normality. Additionally, Meta has apologized for the problems caused, how could it be otherwise.
However, the continuous succession of technical problems of the social network, added to the poor prospects in this regard for the future if we take into account that Meta has undertaken massive layoffs that have not yet ended, is one more reason (and the list is already quite long) to have all the reservations in the world when it comes to using Facebook. And, of course, that premise is not especially positive for what was once the great social network.
