Facebook Couples’ Pages Are Live, And Not Everyone Is Happy With The New Feature

Facebook couples’ pages are feature rolled out in the past few days across the site, and social media users are puzzled and in large part horrified by the new mini-profile hosted at Facebook.com/us.

Facebook couples’ pages are a natural progression from the “View Friendship” feature, one that, as many point out, is really just a re-packaging of the same feature that applies to any friendship. If you’ve yet to see that one, go to a friend’s page and on the right-hand side under their cover photo, click the drop-down and then “View Friendship.”

So yes, the Facebook couples’ feature is technically old — but the new part is that if you yourself are listed in a relationship, and someone clicks on that status (such as married, in a civil partnership, or engaged), a page will display chronicling your jointly tagged statuses, your images together, its start date, et al.

Like much of Facebook, the company didn’t exactly change how it collects your data or even technically how you present your data — it just rearranged it to add a dimension to your profile that you may not have wanted. And like many of Facebook’s less well-received new features, the company is not moved by user outrage over the Facebook couples’ page feature.

In response to CNN’s Facebook couples’ page coverage, the social network’s Jessie Baker responds:

“You cannot deactivate the pages, but you can control what you share on Facebook using the privacy settings for each post … The friendship page respects the privacy setting of each post. This means the person viewing the friendship page may see each post elsewhere on Facebook, like on either friend’s timeline or in news feed. You can curate your friendship page by hiding stories you do not want to appear.”

Baker continues:

“As a reminder, selecting to ‘hide’ an object from your timeline or friendship page does not remove it from Facebook, and the object may show up in other places such as news feed. If you would like to remove a story you posted from Facebook altogether, you can do so by selecting delete post or untagging yourself from photos.”

Do you find the new Facebook couples’ page to be an unwelcome showcase of your personal information, or not a big deal overall?