Now that more than 700,000 Facebook members have signed a petition protesting the site’s new "News Feed" feature (The Chronicle, September 11), is there reason to hope that college students will take online privacy more seriously? Maybe so. But as David Kesmodel points out in The Wall Street Journal, it’s much easier to grouse about privacy violations on the Web than to actually do something about them.
In an effort to make himself invisible online, Mr. Kesmodel ran a program, called Anonymous Surfing, that masks users’ Internet-protocol addresses. And he deleted new "cookies"—the tiny files that Web site use to identify repeat visitors—after every Web-surfing session.
The result, according to the reporter, was a slower, balkier Web. Some sites took a long time to load; others required him to re-enter his login name and password every time he visited. And Web sites like Amazon, which use cookies to generate book recommendations tailored to individual visitors, no longer had a personal touch.
Individually, those are all minor complaints, to be sure. But Mr. Kesmodel says it’s unlikely that many Web users will be eager to accept less convenient Web surfing as a tradeoff for anonymity and privacy. —Brock Read
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