I don't understand why people would publish something and not expect other people to see it. That's literally what publishing is for. It's a similar problem that we're having with a lot of social customs that can be exacerbated by technology. Is it okay to ask about someone to learn more about them? Yes. Unless they don't want you to know, and they'll not answer or make it clear somehow. So here we're saying that because the person has the right to not divulge that the situation is okay. But it's also been accepted cultural behavior to ask about someone to someone else in order to learn more about them. When you ask a friend of someone you're interested in if someone has a boyfriend for example. And if they do have a boyfriend how the relationship is going. It used to be called gossiping if the other person might not have approved. But still there is the right to refuse to tell you. With Facebook we have the right to refuse by not posting. But since Facebook is used to tell people things as its express purpose, users would have to choose not to share things at all to avoid this. But you can still refuse to tell people who aren't your 'friends' on Facebook things by changing your privacy settings, or not accepting friend requests from people you don't want to publicize with. It just gets a little more involved because you're forced to modify the broadcast in terms of technology rather than simply being in a room with only people you want to talk with. Someone going into your previous posts to learn about you is like asking a friend about you, but you might never find out. However, if you've restricted what they can learn about you in the first place then they aren't going to get much out of it. Calling it e-stalking is silly. It's as if a friend didn't keep a secret and you got mad at them, but at the same time you're willing to publish all of your secrets online.
Yeah. Even if your friend didn't keep a secret -- if it was such a big secret, why did you tell them? In the same way, I don't understand why people would put things online if they're worried about which people are going to see them. I don't have this problem because if I consider something too sensitive or private, I simply don't publish it, rather than trying to keep the wrong people from it. I often have trouble posting online (especially social sites and Twitter and such where it's short-form) because, unless I write something at least a little substantial and not too much about myself, I feel that it's hard to come up with something that anyone else should actually give a shit about anyway. So I guess this also helps me not to have this problem. I don't post my new boyfriend, job, other life events on Facebook or whatever because it's none of most people's business, and most of the rest don't care, and those who do will find out otherwise. But this isn't the norm, I think. It seems that there's something in the design or in the common usage of things like Facebook that encourages oversharing (or maybe it's The Narcissism Epidemic) but then there are social rules about it, instead of simple tech restrictions. I'm struggling to come up with an accurate analogy for this paradigm of the acceptable use of social network content, probably because I don't fully understand it to begin with.