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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

I didn't sign up with Facebook expecting them to be good at any of these things. I don't care about Facebook privacy: I didn't give them any private data. I don't care if applications can see my private data: my data isn't private and, more importantly, I don't sign up for applications. I don't plan on going into business with Facebook. I don't care how they treat their developer partners. None of this stuff matters to me.

Why am I pointing this out? Because I think my attitude represents a huge chunk of Facebook's users, and I think most of what's left over after you subtract that chunk consists of people who don't care about privacy period.

I use LinkedIn for business. I use Twitter for geeky stuff. I use Facebook for non-geeky stuff and to post pictures of my kids in their halloween costumes. It all seems to be working out OK for me.

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Because I think my attitude represents a huge chunk of Facebook's users

A common mistake people make here is to think they represent the majority. Hacker news is a very small community.

It always astounds me that 30-year-olds or older think they represent the average Facebook user. I have never seen anyone older than 30 write anything intelligent about Facebook. You people are not real users. Please understand this. How you "use" Facebook is so completely different from how people in college and recent grads use Facebook. For you, most of your pictures were what you actually posted yourself. For real Facebook power users, the vast, vast majority of photos come from other people. It's becoming clear that understanding of Facebook is the clearest dividing line between those in their late twenties and beyond and those younger. You pretend users really sound like old men shouting at kids to stay off your lawn. Why don't you at least try to educate yourselves about how Facebook actually works?

I started university when I was 18, and at the same time I joined Facebook. I'm now 22, close to graduating, and Facebook chronicles my last 4 years of misadventure. Yet I have to agree with tptacek, it's not a big deal.

It's not hard to untag yourself from dodgy photos, leave silly groups, clean up your profile and put professional contacts in a restricted list. Most importantly though, I've come to the conclusion most people expect you to have dirt on Facebook. If your boss wants to be your friend on Facebook and doesn't get why you won't actually share any personal info with them... well, good luck to you, but my professional contacts all seem to understand (and often reciprocate for the same reasons).

That photo you untagged yourself from but your friend is in so mutual friends can still see it - I'll agree that's a problem, but not worth throwing a hissy about. We "lost our privacy" the day the camera was invented.

Why don't you at least try to educate yourselves about how Facebook actually works?

Why don't you tell us how we would go about doing that?

> You people (over 30) are not real users. Please understand this.

Baseless generalization. There's some age correlation there, no doubt, but I know people over 30 who use Facebook as enthusiastically as the most social of high-schoolers, and I know people under 30 who won't touch it. At least among the technically inclined, Facebook usage style is more a matter of personal disposition than age. It's stupid to say nobody over 30 has anything useful to say about the site.

And the over-30-year-olds I know who make minimal use of Facebook? They have plenty clue "about how Facebook actually works", thank you; due to their years of experience I find them often more clueful than the most voracious teenage user. They just choose to use the site differently, or not at all, regardless of their level of understanding.

I myself am well under 30, by the way, lest you accuse me of an age group bias.

According to insidefacebook.com the percentage of users under 25 years old is 39% (http://www.insidefacebook.com/2010/04/02/facebook%E2%80%99s-...) and, judging by their numbers from previous months, falling.

Also, your conception of "real users" sure sounds an awful lot like a minority group of users who use it heavily.

So can you give an example of how your behavior was documented by a photo and then you were later embarrassed by your behavior?

"I have never seen anyone older than 30 write anything intelligent about Facebook."

Have a read of this:

http://web.archive.org/web/20070720160253/http://blog.pmarca...

The author was over 30 and he's now on the FB board.

A common mistake people make here is to think they represent the majority.

Your statement is true in general. But tptacek (the author of the parent comment to your comment) did not write his comment as one HN insider speaking to others, but as a technically aware Facebook user to others. My personal observation of Facebook user behavior (including my many Facebook friends who are not at all hackers) squares with his. My favorite kind of link to post on Facebook is any well written link about security issues with Facebook. My friends read those, and share them with their friends, and most of the friends are reasonably cautious in how they use Facebook. We still have a good time. I don't see Facebook advertisements because I run a general ad-blocker on my browser. I don't sign up for Facebook applications in general. I just have good conversations (much like this one with you) with friends who know me in real life, about links that we find interesting.

The thing getting in the way of understanding each other here is what the average use case is for Facebook. If it's not tricking people into sharing more than they intend to (as seems to the be case for you), then what are we complaining about, right?

I post and upvote links to these kinds of stories because I believe my family and friends do not use Facebook like you do, and are being tricked into sharing more than they mean to.

There's a difference between not caring about privacy and not understanding privacy issues. I would imagine most users are in the latter category.

Most users of most websites probably fall into both - they neither understand nor care about the privacy implications, nor would they even if they were explained to them, as long as the site keeps them "in touch" with a lot of their friends.

I think it would be more accurate to say that they don't care about privacy "at that moment". In my experience many will later care about it, and regret the convenience trade off they made at that time.

I agree - I never post private data to Facebook. But now it doesn't matter if I post private data to Facebook or not. They can start hoarding data from my visits to yelp or pandora or whatever else in the future if I merely forgot to log out of Facebook before going to yelp. And yes, I can change my privacy settings to make them not, but today, I missed the tiny blue banner in Yelp that gave me the option to opt-out, and then it was kind of a pain to figure out how to opt out of whatever I just accidentally opted into. It's turning into a real hassle for me to keep facebook from creeping into the non-facebook parts of my internet experience.

I think you share more private data then you realize. Now that everybody is embedding iframes with Like buttons Facebook can keep a record of all the sites you visit. Are you ready to share this information with the world? What about the videos you watch? Sites like Pandora already know who you are when you arrive at their site, do you trust them as much as Facebook?

"I didn't give them any private data. I don't care if applications can see my private data: my data isn't private and, more importantly, I don't sign up for applications. I don't plan on going into business with Facebook. I don't care how they treat their developer partners. None of this stuff matters to me."

I am sure that this is not the average user experience!

"... I didn't give them any private data. ..."

Maybe, but your interactions are still inferable. If you have friends their interactions with you are also inferable. Anyone or any group you associate with in Fb has the same problem. In some ways what Fb can infer is just as much a problem. So the question remains, "how useful is inference of data to Fb really going to be?"

This was the problem of Livejournal, altho' you could set your journal to be friends-only, your profile page was not. So who you were friends with, what your interests were, what communities you were a member of were completely public. Your only privacy option was hoping that no-one you didn't want to knew your username. Interests you could skip, obv, but because of the way the security model works, the world knew who had permission to read your journal and whose journals you read. So you were only ever as secure as the least-discreet person you knew. And I have some very indiscreet friends...

"I didn't give them any private data"

Do you consider the websites you browse to be private?

Exactly. See my recent 50+ point comment [1] that says basically the same thing.

I really think that the vast majority of Facebook's users just don't care. Remember the Beacon debacle? That big group had what, 300k people or something? A tiny part of the userbase. I could be remembering these details wrong, though.

1: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1311406

edit: I bring up the score because there's obviously a lot of "OMG FACEBOOK SUCKS" posts going around. But obviously there's a lot of people that also disagree. It's not all just Facebook hate, or my comment wouldn't have gotten voted up in the first place.

wow, you're really comfortable posting pictures of your children for anyone to see??

Anyway, as I, and many others have said here before, it's not just about what you post, it's about what _others_ post about you.

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