Fit or not?

Fitsort, the online craze that is sweeping the country, is heading our way. For those of you who are new to the concept, it is a website linked to Facebook that allows users to anonymously rate how attractive they think their friends are. Anyone who has Facebook is on Fitsort, whether you know about it or not. Once on the site, it connects to your Facebook account, then randomly selects two of your friends, providing a profile picture of them for you to compare. Then, the user simply clicks on the image of the person who is, in their opinion, ‘fitter’. Everyone starts with a score of 1000; points are awarded to the hotter friend and taken from the uglier. A simple game, but it doesn’t stop there. Users are then greeted with a screen that shows the two randomly chosen contestants’ wins, loses and overall scores; enabling the viewer to compare their perception of the person to what other people think. It is then possible to view the overall league table to see where you and your friends rank.

The site doesn’t breach any Facebook privacy settings as third-party applications are allowed to access personal information. In addition, Fitsorters can only access photos that your friends would otherwise be able to see when on Facebook.

So legally, they aren’t doing anything wrong, but the moral implications are another matter. While the Fitsort user is aware that they are ranking people, and are likely to be ranked themselves, for people who are oblivious to Fitsort.com, they are being judged by any Facebook friend without their knowledge. While it is possible for users to opt-out, if you’ve never heard of the site then you would never know to disassociate yourself. The creators of Fitsort released a statement regarding the opt-in dilemma:

“Once we realised Fitsort.com was spreading, various mitigations were made – the opt-out feature didn’t actually exist for the first fortnight of the site’s existence, and we now hide the names of all those below a certain threshold rating. Of course, we realise that these compromises pale (in terms of privacy) to that of introducing an opt-in model, and opt-in is something we’ve considered; however, in this case, the site would die – part of the attraction is that it is widespread and varied enough that when first logging in, most people have at least a few friends already in the system (roughly 1/30 UK Facebook users are), and if it were the case that upon first visiting, there was nobody for a user to click on, they’d never return (or enter themselves into the system).”

The main issue is that while we have given permission for our photo to be used through being a Facebook member, it does not mean that we actually want it to be used in this context. When signing up for a Facebook account you must be 13 or over, which is old enough to read the terms and conditions. But for these young and more impressionable users who may stumble across Fitsort.com, the website could potentially be damaging to self-esteem, if it is not interpreted in the intended tongue-in-cheek manner. It could perhaps result in ridicule and bullying for those who aren’t ‘fit’. Does Fitsort.com therefore have a moral responsibility to provide an opt-in set-up for the site?

Is it another way to insult people, or is it simply a bit of fun? With over 4 million votes, with those figures rising every minute, it could be a reinvention of the traditional yet crude ‘Hot or Not Scale’ (ranking a person out of 10) that we are guilty of in daily life. Anonymous, ‘optional’, highly addictive and totally unstoppable; is Fitsort.com simply be an enjoyable past-time or something more sinister?