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Comment by jkincaid | Hacker News Reader

This is the same kind of logic Facebook is using to justify their moves to make everything public, and it's flawed. These are different kinds of public.

For example, with Facebook fan pages there used to be an option to hide which pages/groups you were a fan of. Now you can't do that — all of these are public. There is now no way to hide them without 'unfanning' them.

Yes, before the change if someone started looking through the many thousands (millions?) of fan pages they could have found you listed on one. But now it's just sitting on your profile page.

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It's hard for me to see what the problem is there - it's like me putting a bumper sticker on my car then being worried that everybody might see it, right? Do many people really 'Like' fan pages that they don't want other people to know they like? If so, what's the point? If I like something that I don't really want people to know I like, I just don't 'Like' it on Facebook.

It's obviously very inappropriate to change the privacy settings in ways that deceive people or change privacy settings without users knowing (clearly, and well in advance) that they're going to be changed. But it's hard for me to foresee a coming Facebook diaspora over privacy when I don't think most people think of Facebook as being private... the incredibly vast majority of people that I know don't see privacy as a hierarchical set of access control lists that they're going to tweak to their contentedness: I think they see a particular site as either private (say, gmail) or public (Facebook) and treat their interactions on the site along that binary divide.

If you are a fan of Victoria Secret for their coupons do you want potential employers to see that on your public page?

My girlfriend cut out a couple of "fan pages" like that because now they are all public. That reduces value for the user because they will find other ways to follow these companies (twitter) and to the companies who lose users.

Caveat emptor

A bumper sticker on your car can only be seen by people who actually see your car (small subset of the world). A public post on facebook can be found by anyone who wants to search for it (potentially large subset of the world). I have no way of knowing if you have some crazy bumper sticker on your car, but if you posted something on FB then I can find it via search.

Indeed. But what bumper sticker am I gonna have that I don't mind the 3.5 million people in my city's vicinity potentially seeing but I'm worried about somebody on the other side of the world seeing? I'm sure some such items can be hypothesized (though I'd still ask the person why they're putting a bumper sticker on in the first place if there's anybody they don't want seeing it), but my point is that in practice this just doesn't concern most people and it's hard for me to see why it should.

edit: I think there's perhaps a distinction here between things like personal profile information (one might not one's psycho ex to see their phone number or even wall posts, while not minding sharing them with friends) and things like fan page liking. The former certainly needs privacy controls, and they should be clearer than they currently are; the latter is hard for me to get upset about, and I think it dilutes the message of privacy advocates to mention it.

The idea that some kinds of information are more or less suitable for privacy controls is nonsensical. Say some college kid Bob is gay, but he hasn't told his parents. Bob goes to some fan page for a local GLBT organization etc, and 'becomes a fan', because previously that didn't show up on his profile where his parents might see it, and his parents wouldn't be visiting that fan page anyway. Well, now FaceBook goes and makes fan pages visible on your profile, and suddenly Bob's parents have a lot of questions for him.

You may not find yourself in that kind of situation often, but it is a very real possibility -- there was even a study done where a computer could make a highly accurate guess of whether you were gay just by looking at who is in your friends list (also public), without any information from your profile. Everything on facebook is information.

I could give you an example where the bumper sticker is also relevant, but I think the example above is enough to prove my point.

It doesn't prove anything.

His parents could be fans of that page. His teacher could be.

Becoming a fan of a page, but wanting that to remain private seems contradictory to me.

If you've got an opinion that's fine, but if you post it on here, the least I expect is for you to back it up with reasoning rather than just 'seems contradictory to me'.

My point is, that people become a 'fan' of something, in part, if not often solely to announce to other people that they're a fan. It's inherently social.

Maybe if you're a fan of something deeply unpopular - Java for example, then you'd want to keep that as private as possible.

I think it'd probably just be best for facebook to make the leap and say "OK you privacy nerds, SHUT UP. From now on, everything is public apart from private messages. Now quit your incessant whining."

That's exactly what they have said, in not so many words. And yet people are still whining incessantly.

As for 'becoming a fan' being inherently social, that's true. The issue is whether something that's inherently social is also inherently public. Going on a date with your girlfriend is social, but you may not want it inherently public (and keep in mind there's a difference between internet public and people seeing you together at a restaurant public.

When I've "become a fan" of things on Facebook it's been because I was interested in those things and wanted regular updates about them. It was not out of some kind of weird desire to flash my tailfeathers at people.

I haven't heard of any real instance of someone who had their fan pages set to not show up on their profile and ended up in some sort of bad situation when they were made public on their profile. Everyone is assuming this was done surreptitiously, but the reasonable thing for Facebook to do would be to put a huge dialog on the screen saying "Hey, you had your fan pages set to show up on your profile, but fan pages are now going to be public for everyone. Uncheck the ones you want to remove." If there's no actual case of someone complaining about this, then we don't even know if Facebook did anything wrong. Quit complaining about things that might have happened to other people.

And I suppose you would have had us write down the Bill of Rights after we lose our freedom of speech and freedom of the press? I mean, the government might not want to limit that right? Your argument is BS.

(the point isn't about the extreme of freedom of speech, but your idea that we should only worry about things that have actually happened is total garbage)

Your analogy is just wrong. You were trying to argue that a change Facebook actually made could have hurt people, but your scenario only could have happened if Facebook made the change without making it clear what was going on. If the only aspects of your argument that were hypothetical were Bob's actions, that would be something worth discussing. However, you're making it seem like what Facebook actually did could have hurt Bob, when you have no idea if that's actually the case.

That wasn't my argument at all. I was responding to this claim:

"I think there's perhaps a distinction here between things like personal profile information (one might not one's psycho ex to see their phone number or even wall posts, while not minding sharing them with friends) and things like fan page liking."

My point is that fan page liking is personal profile information. Everything you put on facebook is personal profile information. The Bob example was merely to show that 'becoming a fan' of something can reveal profile information about the person. The fact that Bob could potentially be 'hurt' in the scenario was just to make Bob sympathetic (as opposed to the all too typical scenario where people post severely racist or homophobic content without realizing how public it might be).

Ok, thanks for clarifying. I agree with your point, though I don't think it makes what Facebook did wrong in any way.

>The idea that some kinds of information are more or less suitable for privacy controls is nonsensical.

Should comments on public blogs have privacy controls?

They already do: a comment is a response to the blog. You can post the response on the blog, which is moderately public, or you could email the author, which is more private. You could write a response on your own blog, which may be more or less private depending on whether you actually have readers, and you could conceivably go on television and broadcast your response to the whole world.

There's a difference between the kind of information (response), and the method of communication (comment on a blog).

I would guess more strangers have seen the back of my car than anything related to my Facebook account, easily.

I'm really really bored of this on HN.

There's no real evidence that anyone using facebook really minds the changes facebook makes.

Changes to their privacy are fairly moot. It's not like they're changing the color of a button, making it harder to play fishville or anything massive like that.

Can we get back to moaning about appstore policies now? Or iPad articles?

One of my philosophy professors posted something like, "I logged into Pandora and it showed me all my Facebook friends and what they were listening to, this is too much, Facebook will have to go on without me" last week. And then he deactivated his account.

Facebook users are noticing, the question is how many.

Just another example of how people misunderstand the word "public" when it is used on Facebook. You have control over what shows on your profile. Public means that the connection is owned by both parties; you may choose to hide your side of the connection from your profile, but the fan page, as the other owner of the connection, may choose to display the connection on their profile.

Privacy SettingsFriends -> Tags and Connections Current City, Hometown, Interests, Things I Like, etc. are all fan pages, and you can choose to restrict who can view them on your profile.

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