Is Facebook a Brand that You Can Trust? | Hacker News Reader

Is Facebook a Brand that You Can Trust?

radar.oreilly.com

15 pointsstakent20 comments

"kids to Facebook, blithely assuming that they are free from the roaming eyes of some sexual predator."

Here's where I stopped caring about what he had to say. It's the first point he jumps to: "Think of the kids". And then he goes on to equate a site changing its privacy settings to Perrier giving people cancer and Tylenol killing people.

Hello sensationalism.

While I read past the "think of the kids" argument, I was disappointed analogy of the locksmith. The locksmith didn't unlock the doors while you were sleeping. To follow the analogy, there would have been something over the lock requiring you to either allow the locksmith to unlock the door or to keep the locking mechanism functioning as is.

Given that facebook reset my application blocklist, application privacy settings, and some other settings after I told it not to, I find the locksmith analogy to be accurate. In fact it would be as if the locksmith offered to unlock all my doors and windows and unlocked them after I told him not to.

Well, that and Facebook never claimed to be your house (or a reasonable analog of that model).

Hell, if you sent a letter to Penthouse with your full name and address, you could hardly be upset if Penthouse decided to print your letter in full and your boss saw what an "active imagination" you have. Even if their policy was to previously anonymize all letters and starting with this issue they decided to reverse that decision.

You have willingly entrusted your private details to a third party that has no stake in your well-being or privacy. Stop being surprised when they act as such.

So he's basically saying (loudly) that facebook changed the default privacy settings to be more permissive, which is true. On the other hand, when facebook changed the default privacy settings, they put a giant-ass unmistakable pop-up message telling you about this and literally did not let you access the rest of the site until you had read about it. And the old privacy settings are still available.

I trust facebook not to give away more information than I tell them to, because when they got burned for that before they reacted well and learned from their mistakes. They're certainly encouraging people to open up, and I'm a bit wary of that, but they're a far cry from jumping the shark.

True. But that popup was pretty confusing. It took me a while to grok it, and even then I wasn't exactly sure what my settings were going to be after clicking Done. When I went to check out the new feature of "what my page looks like to most people" (whatever that means), I was very surprised to see that my fan pages showed up.

And apparently people who hadn't tweaked their default privacy settings before (which is probably most people), had the "Everyone" option selected by default. I'm not saying Facebook was intentionally doing something shady, but my reaction was, "Wow, a lot of people are going to be tricked by this."

My thoughts exactly. What wasn't properly communicated by the tool, even to someone who was paying attention, was that my profile picture and my name are now public. AND that I cannot change that.

Not explaining this clearly, especially to people like me who had their profile pic privacy set to "Friends only" before, is what I would consider a breach of trust.

http://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=privacy&section=se...

Took me five seconds to find that. Privacy Settings >> Search. How is that hard?

http://www.facebook.com/privacy/?view=photos

Another five seconds. Privacy Settings >> Profile >> Photos.

Not disputing what you're saying, but... one thing I'd like to see -- which I thought was available before, but maybe not -- is the ability to set my current profile photo as viewable by 'Everyone' (so anyone can find me in a search listing and have a reasonable chance knowing it's actually me based on my profile pic, and not just someone with the same name), but set the contents of my Profile Pictures album to 'Friends Only'.

For now I've set it to 'Friends of Friends' as a hopefully-reasonable compromise, figuring that most of the people I meet are via introductions from friends, and the fact that my (full) name is surprisingly pretty unique.

I think that if you set your profile picture album to Friends Only, that still displays your profile picture to other people. I have mine on display for others, but you can't click though to see others.

> And the old privacy settings are still available

Not quite. I previously relied on one particular setting which seems to no longer exist. I had a "Limited Profile" list of friends who had my full list of friends hidden from them. (One of my friends is the type who might contact/annoy any other female on my friends list who she's unfamiliar with to find out who they are.)

From what I've read, you have no choice but to share your list of friends with all of them. There also used to be an option to hide it from everyone but yourself.

"And the old privacy settings are still available."

So where is this setting: "Settings -> Privacy -> News Feed and Wall -> Facebook Ads -> Appearance in Facebook Ads" ?

I stopped reading when the spectre of pedophilia was brought up. I expect more from oreilly.com. [i work at facebook, but these opinions are mine]

I guess I'm confused why it seems Facebook wants to compete with Twitter in this regard. I don't think fb users have asked for the option to publish their information more privately, so why is it a priority? It feels more to me like fb is moving more toward "make something we can sell" than "make something people want."

I'm confused why people think Facebook is trying to compete with Twitter. It's simply moving in a similar direction, and taking a few of Twitter's ideas that work for its social graph.

Does anybody remember Facebook's original feed, which was the first controversial invention of theirs? Even back then they were working on categorizing and indexing everybody's social goings-on. The fact that Twitter does something similar doesn't make Facebook a competitor. I use both Twitter and Facebook's public search, and Facebook's has a much different feel about it than Twitter's does.

It feels more to me like fb is moving more toward "make something we can sell" than "make something people want."

I don't like the "make something people want" meme. It's too bend-over for me to approve of. But Facebook's not making something they can sell. Public search isn't any more profitable than what they're already doing, which has put them in the green. Rather, they're focusing on making what they want. I'm certain their motives are more selfish than money: From the beginning, Mark and kin's focus has been on studying the patterns of how people interact, and Facebook's design has consistently reflected that. They're not doing that for money, they're doing it because that's what their goal is.

Yeah, that annoyed me. Pretty much any example in that vein provokes a "think of the children"-inspired eye-roll from me. What's the deal with that? Are there no motivating privacy-related example situations other than the threat of child predators?

I wrote a, failed, game for Facebook, but was really surprised what information the FaceBook API would give you on your visitors once they approved your app.

No matter the intent of the changes are. The article implied that they wanted people to share more information, but I think that just stopping the API from giving applications free rain is a good start.

To put a bow around this one, the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), not exactly a bastion of radicalism, concluded after comparing Facebook's new privacy settings with the privacy settings that they replaced:

This sentence is strange. The EFF exists to promote online civil liberties, including online privacy. That they would come down on the side of more privacy is not surprising.

Note I have no problems with their conclusions; my problem is with how the author tried to frame them.

The timing on this article is somewhat notable -- for me, anyway. A few days ago I received an email regarding a user survey for Facebook. I was curious (and motivated: I do use Facebook a lot, and wouldn't mind helping to improve it), so I clicked through.

The survey included some free-form text boxes with open-ended questions, and and one of my answers suggested that FB needs to do more to promote its brand as something people should trust, and take actions that make that trust deserved. I noted that I still do not really trust FB, and that lack of trust curtails my use in ways that probably cause me to get less utility out of the service than I could otherwise.

Part of the problem is that Facebook isn't really a brand yet. They are still trying to define how the site is going to make money. Dragging the customer kicking and screaming usually doesn't do it. Sounds like those guys should learn some card games so they understand the value of a good finesse.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com