As many students probably have noticed, Facebook.com has just become 100 percent creepier. Now user profiles feature a minute-by-minute account of online actions including friend, photo, status and group updates, as well as wall posts. Although members have an option to hide each individual action from their profile, the “news feed” and “mini feed” make issues of Internet privacy personal for most users.

Facebook is great for many reasons. One can look up people who are in their classes, find a friend’s phone number, send online messages, post pictures for friends to view, etc. Users also can change “privacy” levels by indicating whether they want everyone or only friends to be able to view their profile.

However, Facebook stalking is not a scarcely used verb in many colleges across the nation. Profiles tell viewers a lot about a person, and users don’t take this as seriously as they should.

With the new feed features, “friends” can see what other people have been doing on the site for the previous 10 days. This reaches as far as whose walls they have written on, at what minute they changed their relationship status, what event invitations they have declined or accepted, as well as new photos that have been tagged to that particular person.

Although users are able to hide individual actions that appear on their profiles, there is not a function to eliminate these features altogether. If you have a Facebook profile, your actions on the site are automatically recorded on your profile and posted on your friends’ Facebook home pages.

This takes Facebook stalking to an entirely new level. This also brings Internet privacy issues to a tangible level for students. As Internet users learn about increasing amounts of tracking their service providers can perform, now students can actually see themselves being tracked.

We strongly urge University students to look at their Facebook profiles and decide whether theirs includes information they want their “friends” to see. As a program that was initially designed to facilitate communication among peers, we think it has stepped far out of line with its function.