While everybody’s having their usual post-Facebook-changes anyeurism, where they kick and scream about a service they don’t pay for making changes as if there isn’t anything actually significant going on in the world, I’d like to take a moment and talk about the privacy issue.

No, not the usual “Facebook just changed/simplified/complicated/sold-your-shoe-size-to-the-government” privacy issue that occurs once in a while, but of a different kind. The kind that I consider a violation between friends.

The issue I’m talking about here is “friend fishing.” It’s when somebody goes through your list of friends, which you’ve made visible on the side of your profile, and friend requests people that they really have no business “friending.” People who you KNOW there is no humanly possible way that they could actually know this person except through you.

I don’t want to, and I’m not going to name names here, but this has happened on more than a few occasions with my musician friends, however recently it happened in a slightly different context.

I became aware of this over a year ago, when suddenly in the Facebook stream I saw something like,

“[Your Netiquette-Unaware Musician Friend] is now friends with [your third grade teacher, 5 sorority sisters, 1 coworker, 2 of your friends in Hong Kong, and 7 people in some other kind of completely irrelevant context].”

THIS IS NOT COOL.

Sure, I know that the other person on the other side of the friend request is not obligated to accept a friend request. But many of those people blindly accept friend reqs from anybody with whom they have just one person in common, not knowing any better, and/or just not caring, and/or are way too trusting.

However, to the person whose friends list you are fishing, THIS FEELS LIKE A VIOLATION. A violation of trust between real “friends,” a violation of privacy, a violation of boundaries.

When this started becoming a pattern, I decided to just avoid having that awkward “that’s really not cool” conversation with perpetrators and threw everybody in my “music world” into a list of people who can’t see my other friends. Maybe I was lazy, maybe I just didn’t want to have to keep having that conversation. Either way, it seemed like an easy fix. Many people in that world of mine simply AREN’T social-media-etiquette savvy. They don’t know any better, many are all about the “friend collecting,” and Lord knows I get REALLY sick of being on this soapbox.

I’m not saying all musicians do this, mind you. I’m just saying what I’ve noticed among my network has been mostly people in my “music world,” so to speak. What prompted me to write this was a little earlier, I suddenly saw an update in my stream that looked like

“[Guy You've Known Since Middle School] is now friends with [Your Recently-Found, Long-Lost, Very-Close Friend (Who Happens to be a Musician) and Said Guy Remembers You Talking About Her, Which Probably is What Prompted the Subsequent Friending."]

I literally said out loud, “Um, WHAT?!”

Look — THAT’S JUST NOT COOL.

I immediately made it so that NONE of my friends can see who else I’m friends with. But I shouldn’t have to do that. If I let you see my friends list, I am trusting that you’re not going to fish through it and abuse it. I leave it open for the real situations where people I know might go through it and find other people that we actually do have in common, like were in the same high school class, ski club, whatever.

Yeah, okay, so this post is likely a few months too late, with all the newfangled friends-filtering options Facebook has rolled out recently, and let’s not forget the advent of Google Plus and their “Circles” concept, all of which theoretically should solve this problem.

Theoretically.

But this raises a couple questions.

1) Who is going to take the time and go through their already-established, pretty-darn-big network they’ve curated, and meticulously put people into certain piles? I’m not an OCD-in-training 7 y/o separating my Skittles by color because “they have to be that way.” I like all my Skittles to be in the same bag, and although I like to “taste the rainbow” and see all the pretty colors mixed together, I also know that some flavors just don’t mix well together. (Oh, the metaphor… I’m SO deep, I know.)

2) The bigger question it raises is trust. Yes, trust between friends and respect of privacy and boundaries, but I’m talking about a bigger trust here. Trust among ourselves as a society.

If we can’t trust our friends to respect the fences we’ve put around other areas of our lives so much that we have to rely on The Powers That Be of social networks to enable us to tighten those fences… are we, as a society, REALLY ready for what we’ve gotten ourselves into, technologically? Socially? Psychologically?

I don’t think we are, honestly. Some circles aren’t made to be broken, some fences aren’t meant to be scaled, and some lines aren’t meant to be crossed.

I would love to hear your thoughts.

Photo 1 by bodog Dan, pic 2 is album art from Depeche Mode’s Violator, and if you don’t know what pic 3 is, you’re reading this from some other planet.