I'm noticing more and more on my Facebook stream people confused or spreading false information about the new "Subscribe" feature that was released in Facebook recently. Here's what it really does and what it means for you.
First and foremost, your privacy has not been violated. If your profile is set to "Friends Only", only those people who are your friends will see your profile. Anything you do as "Public" will of course continue to be shown publicly to people who are not your friends. This includes "Friends of Friends" and of course the general public. Examples of things that are public are comments on fan pages or group pages where anyone can see them and comment on them or updates and postings you specifically have tagged as Public.
The subscribe feature was introduced to give your friends the opportunity to filter what shows up in the new Facebook Ticker. Essentially, the Facebook ticker is replacing the News Feed and will show real time results of what is happening to any of your friends profiles and pages you have "Liked".
So if you don't want to see a particular friends' updates constantly, you can simply unsubscribe to them and their updates will not show up in your Ticker. If one of your friends is posting too many photos and you're sick of seeing how good their holiday is when you're stuck in the office, then unsubscribe from their photo updates.
Facebook is simply giving you more power and flexibility in what you want to see shown in your own Ticker! There is no privacy risk and your private wall posts to friends will not all of a sudden be out there for the general public and your photo albums are not all of a sudden visible to everyone. Take your tin foil hats off folks, there is no conspiracy.
The other thing the subscribe feature does is allow people to follow your public updates who may not necessarily be your friends. (They could be friends of friends, admirers, fans etc..) So if you post something as "Public" people who are subscribed to you will see those updates, this is nothing new, if you posted something publicly previously they'd be able to see it also. This is particularly useful for people and businesses who live in the public eye and don't necessarily want to maintain two separate accounts. It now gives you the flexibility to update just one account and determine what you keep private and what you share publicly. Note, that if your default settings are private, then all postings will remain private. You physically have to click a drop down box to make something public, so there shouldn't be any accidental public postings.
The other feature implemented this week also includes the ability to implement friend lists. The lists feature is a secondary tier of privacy where you can post updates, photos, videos or links to lists of your choosing. In essence, you're filtering your own updates to only the people you want to see them.
In conclusion I'll end by saying that if you're really that concerned with privacy then perhaps you really shouldn't be using social networking sites in the first place. Spreading false information doesn't help anyone, a little bit of research and simply asking people in the know, goes a long way to alleviating any concerns you might have.
