This project began with my perusal of my Facebook friends list to determine who dispensed the most personal information. I picked a high school friend who I hadn’t spoken to since 2008. I asked her whether she thought she revealed a lot of personal information through her Facebook, and whether or not she limited people that she added to her friends’ list. She seemed to be quite aware of how much information she was releasing, and claimed that she was very limited in choosing friends.

I perused her Facebook profile to see what kind of information I could garner from both her information page and a sample of 3 days worth of status updates. Because she posts quite often, I figured, in her case, I would only have to use a small fraction of information she posted. I also took images of these statuses and added them to the small interactive program I created about her profile and reactions.

I messaged her the information I was able to contrive from her Facebook, and reiterated her reaction in the interactive program. Her reaction was relatively similar to her initial one–she was aware of all of the information she had posted, nothing came as a surprise to her, and she accepted it. This reaction was not what I was expecting, so I decided to explore this further by adding 20 random people to my Facebook. Four of them added me back, all of whom I surveyed.

Those four peoples’ responses to the information I was able to contrive was varied. One of them admitted she was probably being idiotic, another had assumed I was adding her because I wanted to play online games with her.

To view the reactions and the personal information, click on the Shared button below to go to the program I created.