I think this is the first time I'm officially mad at LiveJournal.

I got the announcement in my inbox this morning about the launch of My Guests, which allows you to see who's been coming to your journal. It's an interesting feature to be sure, but they apparently launched it on the 16th and they JUST sent the e-mail out. And it was enabled for everyone by default. So if you don't bother following their news journal to see it right away, you were being tracked for 2 days without your permission.

This is a serious security issue, as far as I'm concerned. It's one thing to allow people to see the IP addresses of visitors; it's quite another to allow them to see personal information regarding who's checking them out, without the guest's permission. They should have had it disabled by default with the option to enable.

And in my case, it stings more because I wanted to see how some old, former friends were doing yesterday, so I checked out their journals for any big news. They don't know that I do this when I'm feeling nostalgic. I think most of them hate me at this point so I don't think I want them to know. I honestly only check because deep down, I still care about them and wished things hadn't gone so sour during the dramatic years. I do this maybe once or twice a year at most, but now they're going to think I'm stalking them or something.

I guess it doesn't matter that much; if they hated me before, they still will now. But I still feel violated.