TO BE OR NOT TO BE.. A FRIEND - Boyd

http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9759401-7.html - request or reject?

The article Friends, friendsters, and Top 8: Writing Community into being on social network talks about friendship through social online sights such as Myspace and Friendster. Boyd discusses the differences between online friends and real life friends as well as many reasons why people accept others as their friend online. She came up with 13 reasons as to why people accept friend requests. Out of the entire list, I believe the two main reasons that people accept friend requests is because having lots of friends makes you popular and its easier to accept then reject. I can closely relate to this article because I am currently a member of Facebook. I believe that people just accept people all the time just to up their number of friends and to look “cool.” I don’t think people look beyond a random friend request. I for one, only accept people if I know them, if they don’t look familiar then I will reject them. I always question when someone random keeps constantly requesting me while I am rejecting him or her. I question as to why they want to be friends with a complete stranger and many questions come to mind. I sometimes get nervous for many security reasons. For example, this random 24-year-old guy from Indiana keeps requesting me and we have no friends in common. I also reject people that are much younger then me, I don’t feel the need for them to see my pictures of everything going on in my life. I for one, never have a problem denying someone to be my friend. I feel no guilt in rejecting someone, if they are someone I don’t know or that I have no personal connection with I don’t see the need for them to know everything about me. I am a rare case, most people I know accept anyone to be their friend. I have also noticed that even though people don’t really know people, they request them and accept out of guilt. One might feel guilty if they reject someone from being their friend however, I don’t.

I found the article, Facebook users pretty willing to add strangers as 'friends’, to be very interesting. A security firm created a fake Facebook account with the name of Freddi Staur. This account friend requested 200 random people to see how any acceptances and rejections he would receive. The results were, “Out of those 200, 87 accepted the friend request and 82 of those gave 'Freddi' access to "personal information" such as e-mail addresses, dates of birth, addresses and phone numbers, and school or work data. Presumably, the other five had restricted 'Freddi' to limited profile access.” I found this very fascinating, the fact that people would accept a random man. I think this has to do with more then the “cool” factor, I think people need to be more cautious. The fact that people can see all information about you isn’t safe. Compared to Myspace, Facebook has much more privacy settings and is more controlled however, people still accept random people. A security analyst said, "It"s extremely alarming how easy it was to get users to accept Freddi.” Accepting random people as being your friend gives them access to a lot of valuable information about oneself. People need to think about security and safety before popularity when it comes to accepting Facebook friends.