Facebook stalking: It's something most of us have accused someone else of doing. It's also something probably most of us have done. We react with suspicion and aversion if someone we've never met comments on one of the favorite bands or books we've listed. Yet, when meeting someone new, we now almost instinctively pore over his or her Facebook page for background information and anything we can infer about the person's personality. If only one person had Facebook, and she listed her interests, favorites and activities on it and supplemented it with pictures of her traveling, partying and sitting around making silly faces, it would be clear that this person was an unbelievable narcissist with unusual exhibitionist tendencies. However, because most of us use Facebook, this no longer seems odd. The statistics about Facebook remain, like the above paradox, familiar and astounding. It is the sixth most popular Web site in the world, says Rolling Stone. Seventy million people check it every day. Over 10,000 people are registered on the Brandeis network. For comparison, Brandeis currently has about 30,000 alumni.

There are more peculiar statistics. If you type "wasting time Facebook" into Facebook's search function, literally hundreds of group results pop up. Some of them are at least honest enough to be titled "I love wasting time on Facebook," but most of them lament Facebook's effect. Again, we are so used to these absurdities it no longer seems peculiar to us that someone would voluntarily join a Web site, then seek out or create a group for themselves and like-minded individuals who spend time on that Web site complaining about how much time they spend on the site they voluntarily joined.

The "privacy" issue is the one that fewer people seem to find absurd. It's hard to quantify this kind of thing, but it's fair to say that a healthy percentage of pictures posted on Facebook are those of people partying. These pictures aren't always of explicitly illegal activities, not that there's really any doubt as to what's in those red Solo cups. However, it's a weird direction we have taken. Many feel an impulse to make the private public: Few parties or large social events are free of at least one person who feels compelled to take pictures and put them on the Internet.

It is, of course, in some ways a fine impulse: the desire to record memories of pleasant events between friends. However, it is also, for many, an overwhelming compulsion, this desire to record and transform a fun social event into dozens of dull candid shots of people talking or gratingly staged "we are having so much fun" group shots. It used to be people could have fun at a party without feeling the need to document it and prove to everyone that they are light-hearted, fun-loving, partying individuals.

The situation is still more complicated. I hypothesize that many students would feel it a gross violation of privacy if Brandeis were to pursue disciplinary action against students with Facebook pictures as evidence. This happened, in a famous example, at Oxford University. Evidently, Oxford students have a tradition of pelting each other with food to celebrate the end of exams. The city council of Oxford claims it costs 20,000 every year to clean this up. Oxford began punishing students for it, using pictures from Facebook as evidence.

The Oxford Student Union called this a "disgraceful" violation of privacy. It isn't: People put pictures of themselves trashing the town on the Internet, and these pictures were used as evidence. Oxford's old rival Cambridge University called the policy a "student witch-hunt." This comparison would make sense if the Puritan magistrates had logged into the Salem, Mass. "Ye Olde Countenance Booke" and found pictures of women engaged in witchcraft and then punished them accordingly. But they didn't.

In examples like this, private activities (partying) are turned into public spectacles (via the Internet), then jealously guarded as private again (when viewed by unintended elements of the public).

The reason the crime of stalking is so unsettling is that the stalker has to cross the boundaries of decency and privacy to find information about his victim. You are not being "stalked" if someone finds information about you online that you, under no compulsion except your own, put on display. No one is violating your right to privacy by examining all that you have made public.