The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook | Hacker News Reader

The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook

mattmckeon.com

166 pointskareemm26 comments

This is exactly the kind of visualization that we should have to manage the privacy settings.

Wonderful visualization.

Also worrying. With each new iteration, I try to go over my settings and make sure my profile remains as private as it was in '05, but there so many fucking changes and settings, I might just quit one of these days.

I wanted to write up a blog post on how to manage your privacy settings, but I couldn't figure out myself how to do it and that was what pushed me to finally deactivate the account.

You can deactivate your account when you sign off, then reactivate it whenever you want to do something with it. That way you are hopefully less vulnerable to their bugs and random privacy changes.

Pro tip: some settings reset to defaults when reactivating, so double check. A while back I found all of my notification settings reset to "email on everything" upon reactivating, and I think some privacy settings were different too.

This needs to be more widely publicized.

I fully expect wall posts to start opening up significantly this year. That is where most of the 'real time' information is and given their need to imitate twitter, it would not surprise me in the least if we start seeing less privacy here.

If wall posts are forced open despite my current 'friends only' setting, I'm gone. It's the only thing I am still comfortable doing there. Might as well twitter otherwise, no ads there yet.

That should be 'devolution'.

Evolution has no direction, no intended goal.

There is a difference I think in how people use evolution in the English language sense:

"evolution can refer to any sort of progressive development"

whereas in the biological sense you are right.

Since this is not about biology I figure we can safely assume that a 'progressive development' is meant and the article linked very much supports that.

The word 'devolution' is probably not used properly here, but I tried to indicate that I don't think this is 'progress', but rather the opposite.

More like 'The Deterioration of Privacy on Facebook'

Evolution also relies on natural selection. This is more akin to intelligent design.

I've got a question.

I really am starting to think Facebook went through my Gmail contacts without me even authorizing it to do so. In the past hour, it's suggested three people I

1) Don't have any friends in common with 2) Never searched for on Facebook 3) Never contacted other than through Gmail and 4) never even worked with

One guy, I used to play Team Fortress Classic with, who only I've talked to through email showed up in my suggestions. Has anyone else experienced this?

The contact importer works both ways; so if A has emailed B, and A imports his contacts, A might get recommended to B as a friend. This is the usual explanation for mystery PYMK suggestions.

That said, the algorithm for finding candidate pairs uses a lot of features, including past employers, schools in common, graph features other than just distance, etc. Occasionally it has a surprising success like this.

I just noticed this when helping someone I know create an account. Many of her Yahoo contacts were recommended without it asking for a Yahoo login (Ironic, eh? Facebook calls that criminal when other companies do it.).

It also found many of my friends whom she had never even heard of---I had even defriended a couple of them. I'm thinking that it's also recommending based on cookies/session or IP address---perhaps their logic is that a person living with me likely knows many of the people whom I know.

The good news is that the eviller Facebook gets, the more of a market it creates for the "kinda like facebook, but not evil" competitor to come along.

I'm not sure how you could get traction, but aiming it directly at people who are disillusioned with facebook over privacy and stupid apps would be the way to go... position it as a "clean" and "sophisticated" alternative to facebook, and make it super-easy for people to control what information goes to whom.

"I'm not sure how you could get traction..."

I think one way to get traction would be to expand a profile or messaging feature of an existing site that has a reputation for trustworthiness with user data, and then fork the feature after it reaches critical mass.

I have been trying to come up with a design for a Open Social Network. Something you can host yourself or use from a "trusted" third party with the ability to seamlessly connect with each other.

The idea is:

1) You take your data where you want

2) You control you privacy

3) Seamless integration with different installation running all around the world.

4) Open Source (So it can be peer reviewed)

5) Tools for migrating from facebook and other Social Networks

6) Dead simple and user friendly UI. Built for people who can not differentiate between facebook and readwriteweb

I'd love to see something along those lines which is exactly why I kicked some money to the Diaspora project: http://www.joindiaspora.com

1) JSON for everything. Want to leave? Download your profile in a text file.

2) Make it like email. Every item has a "to" list. Nothing outside the list can see.

3) pubsubhubbub or webhooks.

4) OK.

5,6) Difficult to impossible.

Half the features on this graph didn't exist in 2005, for example: photos. There was basically no privacy initially, everyone at your school could see everything, which wasn't much.

Photos were introduced in 2005. I was on Facebook in Sept. '04, and there were absolutely privacy controls at that point. You could find people in your network through search, but you couldn't see anything other than their name and class year (even profile pictures were opt-in restricted). It's possible that at the very very beginning there were no privacy controls, but my school was whitelisted-in very early (if I recall correctly, we were the third or fourth after Harvard).

The acceleration is what worries me... What's next: July 2010 - SkyNet

Nope; Skynet had intelligence.

What made Facebook great at first, is what is missing now...

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