The popular social networking site Facebook has had its share with issues regarding its privacy settings. There have been complains on the introduction of News Feed and Mini Feed features and the removal of the privacy control for the two features which made things difficult for the users to control what would appear on their walls. After trying to solve the increasing level of privacy issues in Facebook, the social media has now added a new feature called Subscribe button in its page.
The Subscribe button is a brand new way to manage the news feed process in Facebook. It allows the user to tailor the news feed by customizing its contents to only those that the user wants to see, and seeing less of those that one does not consider as important to see everyday such as game-based score updates.
A plus factor for the Subscribe button is that it allows the user to subscribe to other Facebook users who are not necessarily in their list of friends. This can allow the user to easily expand his social circles in the most non-conflicting manner because one may no longer receive ignore request possibilities if the user is not part of the friends list of the person being subscribed.
Subscribe technically allows Facebook users to see more of the updates regarding the people they wouldn’t be normally able to get news from, people like famous celebrities and politicians as long as these people have their own Facebook accounts too. Because the subscribers do not necessarily have to approach their idols with a friend request – which can be irritating when the person asking for request is unknown to the one approached, then having the Subscribe button can be quite a pleasing experience.
But really, anything that can address the silly automatic updates in Facebook’s news feeds is perhaps a welcome change. It’s better to see updates on people the users like than seeing updates on games or apps they have not really subscribed from. But since this new feature is not turned on by default, the users may still need to activate this from the official subscribe page.
The problem however is this, what if the person being subscribed really wants to keep off the subscriber from knowing his personal activities? Wouldn’t this still be a breach of privacy?
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