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Comment by steveklabnik | Hacker News Reader

Nope. I'm not.

Yes, privacy is important. However, the only information that I've ever put on Facebook is information that I'd want everyone else to know. That's why I have a Facebook; to give people who don't know me an idea of who I am and what I'm like, and get a little bit of personal branding out there. For instance, there's at least one little portion of my life that I don't want to be broadcast out to everyone, so it's conspicuously missing.

I don't feel that Facebook told anyone that their data would be private. Maybe I'm just naïve, or a little bit of an exhibitionist.

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"I don't feel that Facebook told anyone that their data would be private. Maybe I'm just naïve, or a little bit of an exhibitionist."

This was actually how Facebook got popular in the first place. The whole point was that it was more private than the other social networks out there. As the site grew, one of its big selling points was its privacy control panel, which gave you granular control over how your content was shared.

Perhaps the perception has changed in the last year or two, but I think a lot of people signed up under the impression that Facebook is a safe/private site.

I think you're conflating privacy with exclusivity. Facebook was originally only for those in college because it was an electronic version of a book that was put out by Zuck's college.

Secondly, I don't think that Facebook's privacy controls were ever a big selling point. The fact that it was for cool kids combined with the fact that all of your friends were on it was a huge selling point. Yes, people use the privacy controls, but never the fine grained stuff, it's all "don't show info to people that aren't my friends."

Or maybe my perception was skewed. Facebook came to my school in September of my freshman year of college, so I'm literally in the exact cohort that grew up with it.

"Yes, people use the privacy controls, but never the fine grained stuff, it's all "don't show info to people that aren't my friends."

Exactly. People didn't care much about the granular stuff, just that only their friends could see what they were posting. With the changes FB has made to its settings (namely, the 'Everyone' setting that is now the default), that's no longer true.

For what it's worth, I was in the exact same group as you — Facebook came out while I was in college and I joined the day it came to my school. Exclusivity definitely played a part in helping it catch on, but I think Facebook's reputation as a "safe" site is what helped it make the jump from high school/college kids to everyone else.

As I said to someone below, though, it's not surprising that Facebook makes everything public by default. Facebook is highly incentivized to get people sharing with each other, and the more public things are, the better it is for them. I'm not sure what the answer is to this, if it needs answering. It's possible that the privacy people are in the minority.

That's another thing, though; we've both really only got data from our own anecdotal experiences and interpretation of our friends' descriptions of what makes Facebook valuable to them. Who knows, maybe we're both outliers, and the vast majority of Facebook's users use their ACL based system heavily.

Well, the "it's for cool kids" selling point took a big hit when they started letting high schoolers on it, and lost all credibility when I started getting friend requests from senior citizens and friends' parents.

And most of my friends don't actively use it, though most of us at least have a FaceBook account. I find that I'm getting bombarded by sheep from weak connections that aren't really doing anything with their lives, while most of the people that I actually care about, I either see in person or they have busy lives and don't spend much time on FaceBook either.

It's true, but by that time, they were so big and huge that it didn't really matter.

I don't actually log on to Facebook that much either. I do have my Twitter hooked up to post status updates, and I generally get as much engagement as I do on Twitter itself, so I log in to continue discussions with people commenting on my status. But that's about it.

If you're getting bombarded by sheep, try clicking the 'block updates from this application' button next time. I've been happily bullshit-notification free for a while now.

I'm similar. I use it to keep in contact with some far-flung family, but without Facebook I'd be using Skype more than I already do, or I'd just go oldschool and pick up a phone and call on a weekly basis.

Facebook is a mild convenience to me, like finding a good time to make an international call was a mild inconvenience. Once it becomes a mild inconvenience, facebook will be long gone.

Hm, if I remember correctly, what made Facebook popular at first, was that it was aimed at a more "mature" audience, as opposed to MySpace which was (and probably still is) infested by teenagers. For example, it didn't, and still doesn't, allow you to configure your page with auto-playing music, videos, custom backgrounds and fonts, and lots of animated GIFs. It also had a higher age limit at first, for what it's worth.

I agree with a lot of what you're saying, and I'll miss Facebook for the very reason you like it, too.

But I'm often more worried about what my friends do that can effect the amount of information out there, about me. Facebook makes it easy to inadvertently share information about your friends. That, I don't like.

I'd love a replacement Facebook, one that is a little bit like Facebook used to be: relatively simple, unintrusive and benign. I want fine-grained control over what I can share, and not to have to worry about what will be given away. Or at least know upfront what will be. Opting IN to things is great.

Basically, Facebook has treated me (and those who feel similarly) like crap.

Even with the way Facebook used to be (I signed up in 2004), people could have still shared information about you. One wall post is all it takes.

For that matter, this could happen anywhere on the Internet. Someone could write a blog post about you, or tweet about you, or any number of ways to publish information about others. The web is increasingly becoming read/write, and Facebook privacy settings aren't going to change that.

Writing a wall post or tweet takes active action on behalf of the friend. Hmm, this is on Jarek's Facebook profile -- let's paste it somewhere where others can see it too.

With the recent app privacy changes, all they have to do is use an app. The programmer can take care of the rest. Different level altogether.

Much of the talk I have been around has been that Facebook is adjusting societies mores as it concerns to what information you share about oneself and how one judges others. The result of this could be that Gen Y and Z will have a better integrated outlook on people.

I'm not sure if this will actually be the case, there could be a backlash against this (much like the backlash against the sexual revolution of the 60s/70s) or simply that "oversharing" will be done by a section of society while the rest continue to judge as we do today.

I have unfettered access to a rather large social graph so I should make some studies of this.

Anyone know some good reading on the subject to get me started?

Yep. I think this is what's happening. I wrote a bit about the topic on my blog a while back: http://blog.steveklabnik.com/the-burning-question-of-reputat...

If you find any other people discussing this, I'd be interested in reading, too.

Edit: It's kind of funny reading old things you've written. At the time, I felt like I might have said "asshole" one too many times when writing this post, and now I _definitely_ feel that way. Oh well, I apologize for the moderately excessive profanity.

Facebook's new Open Graph makes it easier for a "replacement Facebook" to help you find your friends!

> However, the only information that I've ever put on Facebook is information that I'd want everyone else to know

Congratulations, you already demonstrated your agreement with the author and effectively stopped using Facebook then.

The whole point of Facebook is to enable a you to form a private community of friends that share things. If you've degraded that to "only what I will share with everyone in the universe" then you've essentially withdrawn from Facebook already.

Maybeyou've assumed facebook is for private things. I assume anything on the internet is public, at all ties, except for my bank.

I'd say that's a pretty common assumption. Back in the day Facebook really did use to be a pretty walled garden and I have no doubt things were said that would not be said on Twitter or elsewhere on the web. I'm sad to see that aspect go.

Maybe it's different for people with 300 or 600 friends.

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