WebProNews

Facebookers have made quite a stink about lack of privacy on Facebook, especially when it comes to what information appears in their news feeds. But marketers aren't the only ones mining this unprecedented access to personal relationships; academic types are too.

Hundreds of thousands of users voiced their concern when Facebook introduced its news feeds, which automatically posted changes to members made to their profile. They complained even though the information published via the feed was generally "public" information.

It shouldn't have been a surprise, then, that there was another uproar (strangely, though, with fewer voices) over Beacon, which published what Facebook users were purchasing on other sites without express permission to do so.

The fact is that Facebook is a consumer data goldmine, and users are increasingly coming to grips with that. It makes one wonder though, how they feel about silent observers who glean that data for scientific purposes – even if the data is public.

According to the New York Times, researchers at Harvard and UCLA are monitoring an entire class of college students as they pursue "one of the Holy Grails of social science": whether personal taste determines friendships, or the other way around.

Studying the Web 2.0 phenomenon seems to be a growing trend. A California school introduced YouTube 101 this year, to get a better feel for social media and its impact on society.

The beauty of the information available via social networks and/or social media is that it provides a truly unintrusive way of observing human behavior. "Unintrusive" in the sense that the researcher doesn't interfere with the subjects, but the subjects may not like it that they're being watched.   

A critic might be right to note, as many did when Facebookers protested the introduction of the Facebook News Feed, that if users don't want to be spied on, they should consider making their profiles private. Otherwise, everything you do there is a bit like mooning a TV camera. It doesn't really make sense to shout at the medium, then, for broadcasting it.

Like Girls Gone Wild flashers, they're just giving away the goods.

I wonder though, if academic studies of online social networking give a true glimpse of human relationships. That "Holy Grail" they're speaking of seems to be only an insight into how humans behave online, sans the regulatory functions of the orbitofrontal cortex (the part of the brain that makes you be polite) and the incentive to be genuinely you.

It seems a study of human behavior would bring results that measure how human avatars behave instead.