Please update your Facebook privacy settings
frog.posterous.com
frog.posterous.com
I've been very careful to ensure that my FB profile is as locked-down as possible, yet last night when I was uploading the latest round of baby photos I caught, out of the corner of my eye, that the album was public by default.
If a technically-inclined person like me can find this difficult, what chance does the general public have?
Since then their privacy settings have become convoluted (as expressed by the OP). Meanwhile I have uploaded countless photos, made comments, etc... and become quite invested in their ecosystem.
(FWIW, I'm a web developer. I can create my own photo sharing site for my friends and family. FB is just really, really good at doing that stuff. Part of my disappointment is mourning the erosion of an otherwise excellent web app.)
This does well to illustrate what a fiendishly difficult thing it is for a typical Facebook user to maintain privacy settings, and how difficult it must be for Facebook to actually adhere to this rigamarole in every view, API, feed, et al. presented by their site. (And they do screw that up from time to time.)
Part of the reason I think they want to "simplify" privacy by making more stuff open is because it is such a royal pain to implement. Compared to Twitter, the logic that must go into every database query to determine viewability of friends or comments or pictures must be ridiculously complex. The current ability to group friends into lists is roughly equivalent to implementing ACLs on groups, which is just as much fun for the user to set up and maintain as it is for a programming team to get working (not fun at all).
I want an application that allows me to keep in touch with my long distance friends easily, as I've moved around the country. Is it so much to ask that I'm not manipulated and exploited in the process?
At the risk of being down-voted due to lack of agreement, Facebook is an opt-in service. They are making their priorities and privacy changes abundantly clear.
Concerned? Opt-out of using Facebook.
I don't get it; do the monitors of HN not think the users of hacker news are intelligent enough to decide if Facebook's privacy policies are positive/negative on their own?
Or to put in another way... Why do pro-Facebook privacy policy comments continually get down voted?
Down-vote = "I disagree" OR "This is not a valuable comment"
I would guess that most people disagree with pro-FB privacy policy statements.
The vast majority of users (debatably all, outside of the ones that signed up since this went into effect) signed up for Facebook under the pretenses they had control over their privacy. To varying degrees depending on when they signed up, of course- for instance when I signed up it was (in theory) only shown to users at my school, and I had the option to only allow friends (which of course I have control over).
I agree- for the people signing up from this point forward, they're opting into it and should educate themselves enough to know what they're opting in to (though I would argue they get duped anyway, but such is life and was, for instance, MySpace before). But what about all the current users, that aren't even going to realize that all their data is no longer private and they no longer have control over it?