Facebook Groups Don?t Have A Privacy Problem, But Someone Needs To Can The Spam

This morning there has a rash of reports claiming that Facebook Groups may be somehow violating your privacy, possibly heralding the latest in Facebook's long string of privacy blunders. The uproar, if you can even call it that, was sparked in part by Jason Calacanis who was "force-joined" into an untoward group called NAMBLA without his consent, which could conceivably tarnish his reputation if the story popped up in a friend's News Feed.�But Calacanis wasn't the first person to notice this potential problem: we were testing exactly this functionality last night. Our conclusion? If your friends are jerks, you could have a minor annoyance on your hands; for everyone else, this simply isn't a privacy threat. The real problem, as plenty of others have noticed by now, is spam. In his email decrying the new feature, Calacanis writes how it "seems as if anyone can add anyone" to a Facebook Group, which opens the door to abuse. But he glosses over one key point: in order for someone to add you to a group, they have to be your Facebook friend. And yes, if you've decided to 'friend' a bunch of people you don't know (or know to be troublemakers), then you could have an annoyance on your hands. But the same has been true for ages on Facebook.

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