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Should Social Sites let us know when our profile is viewed?

2009, August 1 - 13:06 — PatParslow

Some social sites, such as Facebook, don't give you any inkling of when your profile page, or any materials you post, have been viewed.  Some dating sites let you know how often your profile has been viewed, although one can never be sure whether this is an accurate figure or an attempt to get people to upgrade their accounts. Academia.edu lets you know when someone visits your profile there from a search and the keywords they used to find you.

Personally, I really like this feature of Academia.edu. It is always interesting to see that when details of a conference session I am presenting at is posted up online, I get a surge of visitors - even if the small check I have done indicates that maybe this counts against attendance.  One conference workshop, I asked whether any of the people in my session had been amongst the ones who had searched and found me on Academia.edu, and nobody there admitted to it.  I deduce that the people who had looked me up had decided not to come to the session, but at least that meant that they didn't 'waste their time' coming to something they presumably decided they were not interested in!

As part of the This Is Me project, I interviewed a number of students.  One of the questions I asked was whether they thought it would be beneficial, in terms of managing their Digital Identity, if systems like Facebook let them know when their profile had been visited, and possibly who had visited it.  They unanimously said that if they knew Facebook did such a thing, they would be less likely to use it, despite all saying that they never browsed around other users' pages much. 

Maybe I am just out of step with the younger netizens, but it seems to me that having this sort of information is really useful.  If you are nervous about being stalked, this information might give you a heads up if something was going on.  If you are building your Digital Identity to help promote yourself, either for your career or just your general social profile, it lets you know how you are being found.

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Comments

2009, August 1 - 14:15 — Jo Hart (not verified)

Profile views

Personally would find it useful to know when/how many profile views - not sure of relevance of comment on yr post re "privacy" as in mho knowing when/how many does not equate to "who". From yr post I drew the conclusion that u had info on when &/or how many but not who. For me this wld be an entirely appropriate and, as I have stated earlier, extremely helpful!

2009, August 1 - 13:57 — PeteJ (not verified)

Reader privacy

I suppose it may vary depending on the nature of the service, and maybe if the practice is made clear to all users up front, it may not be a problem, but as a general rule I dislike sites which reveal the ids of page visitors, and I tend to avoid them. I consider it a breach of my privacy to disclose my id to other people when I visit their (public, or visible to all members) page.

I think last.fm provides that info to paid subscribers. At the moment, I like last.fm too much to abandon it, but on the occasions I am browsing around people's profiles, I try to remember to log off beforehand.

I'd be happy enough with services that provide an anonymous number of hits or a list of search keywords which brought visitors to a page, and it seems to me that helps answer your "am I being found?" question without compromising the privacy of the visitors.

On a related note, I've never understood people using that service (the name of which I can't recall) where bloggers embed a widget which tells not just the blogger but any other subsequent reader that you visited the page! If I want to tell the world, I'll leave a comment or Twitter about it or whatever! If I don't, my visit is between me and the blogger's server logs :-)