Timeline of Facebook Privacy Policies from 2005 to 2010 | Hacker News Reader

Timeline of Facebook Privacy Policies from 2005 to 2010

w2.eff.org

86 pointsmcantelon14 comments

I just canceled my Facebook account today, after thinking about it for some time, and specifically in reaction to recent events. The type of decline illustrated in this timeline is reason number one. From my point of view, Facebook is no longer enhancing my life activities, and now on its way to hindering it.

The various reactions to canceling my account were interesting. Some people seemed almost angry. Some just wanted to make sure to get my email.

I deactivated my account for exactly the same reasons as you. No one has missed me yet, so I'll be completely closing it soon.

I'd expect that facebook would be prepared to lose some well informed and privacy conscious techies in the decisions they have made. The general public consensus seems to be that they either don't care about privacy or don't care enough at this stage to outweigh the benefits of using the social network all their friends are on.

I don't mind personally, my account is all public and I never post anything that I wouldn't be comfortable with anyone seeing. I guess I mainly use it to see what others are up to and posting and engage that more than I put my whole life on there.

Informed techies are a powerful force. Look what we did with Firefox: we recommended it to everyone and it worked. We are asked which antivirus to use. We are asked how to do X or if we know of a program to do Y. When we speak, the mainstream eventually follows.

That is true, the network effects make it a more complicated equation though, using Firefox didn't mean that you can no longer use certain aspects of the web. I guess it has to do with a critical mass of people, first enough trying your product that it's visible that facebook is no longer the one stop shop for all your friends data (I guess this is what Twitter is, although it's not so much a general purpose social network). Then eventually you need to get to the point where enough users are on board to make it a better use of a persons time to communicate through the new network without losing to much value.

Once you hit this point there is no coming back as has been shown with myspace. I guess a parallel could be drawn with IE - FF there, once a user has been converted to FF and decide it is better IE faces a monumental task to get them back, something they may never achieve, always appearing to be one step behind with a heap of non standards syntax for good measure.

I am also in the process of canceling my Facebook account. But I am doing so in a way which will (hopefully) educate my Facebook friends on the "Why?" part (i.e., posting links to relevant web-pages).

We are not going to achieve critical mass simply by walking away ourselves.

That paints a pretty telling picture. I took the opportunity to look through my privacy settings on Facebook. It seems that applications can now access certain information about me through my friends, even if I haven't made that information publicly accessible. It's checked by default and needs to be disabled.

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

So I could write an app that would get me information about my friends friends that I can't access?

I wonder - The wall posts, pics, etc., that I posted 4+ years ago, is that data covered by the privacy policy that was in effect at the time?

I would bet that when they introduced new policies they made you agree in some way that they applied retroactively if you continued to use the site.

Facebook used to make it possible to forbid their APIs to access your profile. They dropped that a few months ago, which has been my biggest concern. It seemed a silly thing for Facebook to do. Despite my frequent attempts to encourage people to opt out of the API, I estimated that only between 1 and 2% of my friends list had done so. By removing the option they hardly changed anything but antagonized the tiny fraction of privacy conscious, probably vocal, people.

To (attempt to) prevent linking my Facebook account to my browsing practices I currently block the following in Adblock Plus:

  * connect.facebook.com*
  * facebook.com/widgets*
  * facebook.com/plugins*
  * api.facebook.com*
  * apps.facebook.com*

running Facebook in a different browser instance would be another option. Neither fix stops random people from accessing my friends list and potentially other information anonymously and programmatically. This is making me think about ditching Facebook.

So... what are the Facebook alternatives that are looking strong?

Also, what tools are available for extracting all your data? (Pictures, notes, etc for example)

The other telling thing is that along the same timeline their userbase has grown immensely. Most people don't care about or understand internet privacy.

FWIW: http://www.wikihow.com/Permanently-Delete-a-Facebook-Account

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