![]() Farley, a modern etiquette expert who writes and consults as " Mister Manners," says that removing random acquaintances from your Facebook network probably won't hurt anyone's feelings, but cautions against overdoing it. I've done a number of projects where I've added people in my professional network who I no longer work with, and who really don't need to see yet another picture of my dog." "It's not malicious," Levy says, "I just evaluate how I know the person, and if I even remember how I met them. Each day, he logs into his Facebook account, clicks on each birthday notification, and either sends well-wishes or quietly unfriends the connections. These little daily reminders encourage Facebook users to acknowledge their friends' birthdays as they come up. "I realized that Facebook built a feature that makes cutting down and managing your friendships easier: birthday notifications," he says. If you've got thousands of friends to sift through, that process can be tedious, and Levy has started using a technique that's gained a following in the past few years. (Facebook doesn't notify people you unfriend, but the company will send a notification if you try to add them back. ![]() Once you click the button, the friend just disappears. But be careful! There's no confirmation prompt. Instead, you need to go to your Facebook profile, select friends one at a time, hover over the drop-down menu and select Unfriend. For example, there's no way to select a large swath of people, say "Everyone From High School," and cut them loose. Here's how savvy users can pare their friends lists, and then communicate with them effectively while preserving a measure of privacy.įacebook doesn't make it easy to delete mass quantities of friends. Facebook provides lots of tools to help with this task. Once your network is at the size you want, you may still have many hundreds of friends to manage-or 1,900 in Levy's case. I see more posts that are relevant to me and the people I know." "I do feel like my newsfeed has gotten better. "I'm not trying to get rid of everyone, just the random ones," Levy says. Over the last few months, he has pared down his friend list by 500 people. Paring down an overgrown friends network can be both awkward and time consuming, but Levy has become an expert. "Digital privacy isn't just dependent on your actions as an individual," says Gennie Gebhart, a researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, "it's also about the privacy practices everyone in your network employs." Facebook has since tightened its rules, but just as in real life, the more people you share information with, the less control you have over it. But business cards are disposable, while digital connections last.Īnd an oversized friends network can have privacy repercussions: While only about 270,000 people took the quiz from Facebook's Cambridge Analytica scandal, they ended up exposing the data of 87 million of their Facebook friends. For many, connecting on Facebook is the modern equivalent of exchanging business cards. Levy isn't alone in feeling that his list of Facebook friends is out of control.
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