Openbook
youropenbook.org
youropenbook.org
On the other hand, had I not just deleted my FB account, I would have been upset over this. Zuck's gang recklessly opens up whatever they see fit: it could easily and quite possibly be photos tomorrow and your wall the next day, and (as before: http://cl.ly/16wW) your "private" chats the day after that.
Irresponsible and disrespectful.
I can't stand this FB bashing. Zucks gang recklessly opening up whatever they see fit? It's a FREE SERVICE!
Problem is, I don't know 'the public'.
Many of them have no idea that suddenly their shit is public. I'll bet the old default search on this service of "Rectal Exam" which had painful details in many cases of people or their family with cancer, or this DUI search are examples of shit if people knew better would set private.
Unfortunately they most likely THINK they're still private. ( To be fair I'm more likely to think Rectal Exam would be something people would prefer private... the DUI people seem more like they might not care who knows).
Most users of services like Facebook can barely figure out how to login - they most certainly don't spend the amount of time the fine denizens of places like Hacker News do reading about the latest privacy changes and flaps. It's a disservice to expect (and I'm speaking from the standpoint of Facebook's "Let's randomly change settings" because they KNOW they're changing things and most people don't realize they've changed) the average Facebook user to realize that suddenly something which for years has been private (friends + family only) is suddenly public.
On one hand you have the aforementioned prior default search of this service (posted last week) which brings up embarrassing details about hemorrhoid surgeries and heartfelt updates about Grandma's rectal cancer. This is stuff that the simple reality is well, people have a right to expect they're posting a private update to friends and family. A few years prior this would be the kind of thing you'd send in an email blast, perhaps.
On the other hand you have the DUI stuff. In all reality the current glance at it is it's a lot of pucker faced young kids who probably genuinely don't care right now. I can't and won't assume they aren't proud of their current status as a drunk driver. But I guarantee in a few years when suddenly their careers take off (I'm being optimistic and hopeful on all of their behalves - so many of them look too young to even legally drink in the US) that this will become a problem.
Not every employer runs criminal background checks (Which most certainly would flag a DUI) and those are typically done in conjunction with / contingent with a job offer. But many employers these days are Googling the names of people who send them resumes. I can guarantee (again, being optimistic) that these people would NOT like to find out Googling their name brings up a proud brag about their DUI conviction.
TL;DR - I'm still half asleep, but what I'm saying is the issue is bait and switch. Hacker News readers know about every privacy change that is made at Facebook. My mom and sister though, for example, only know what historically has been true. They assume that their updates by default still go to family and friends. They filter their posting with that in mind. Your average user is NOT informed that their updates suddenly go public, and can be viewed by anyone.
edit - it seems it does a random search now. Previously it opened up "Rectal Surgery". This morning it defaulted to "DUI" for me. Hence my commentary above (assumed it was statically defaulting to DUI incorrectly now)
Still of course a world of difference from "publicly searchable".
Your Facebook photos are not private at all. Anyone who has a URL to your photo can see it. In fact, anybody can access any file on FBCDN[1] as long as they have the URL to said file.
We share lots of Facebook pics on irc://irc.oftc.net:6667/#hackers-india. A lot of us don't have FB accounts, but those who do paste FBCDN URLs of interesting pics in the channel. Fun times :)
[1] FBCDN is Facebook's content distribution network
It's sometimes even possible to turn knowing a random FB Photo URL into viewing a whole (or part of) an Album.
After all, when someone else is permitted to upload photos of you to the internet, all bets are off.
If you couldn't share the URLs on your IRC channel then you could just copy the photos and post them to an image sharing website.
It looks that way. Currently delete facebook account is one of the top searches on Google. [ http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=delete%20facebook%2... ]
No no no no no, that's not what those graphs show. They all hit 100%. It's growing extremely quickly, but the graph shows nothing more. By the same graphs + the flawed interpretation, in July 2008, "Batman robin" accounted for every Google search. Look! 100%! http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=Batman%20robin&...
Why do I see this continually misinterpreted? The "learn what these numbers mean" link is pretty darned clear, and it can easily be grokked by doing more than one search.
Twitter users, unless they protect their tweets (in which case you're not searching though them: surprise!), know that everyone can see their tweets. Facebook users have "friended" the people they want to see their status updates.
Either you're genuinely confused, in which case I hope I've cleared things up, or you're using this as a red herring.
>Not a big user of either twitter or facebook, But I am trying to understand this.
You know there are people out there who are actually foreign to how Facebook works because either they don't use it or find it silly. I am not trying to defend facebook or twitter. I actually find the whole idea of following around people's mundane activity utterly stupid. ~400 million people obviously thinks otherwise.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_brags_35_adjus...
Some of these people in the search results know they're sharing with everyone. Some don't. The mere presence of people who don't understand their privacy settings doesn't suggest that a large portion of the Facebook userbase shares that confusion.
I also queried "I love my wife", "I love Shakespeare", "quaternions" and wound up wasting more than an hour on this site. It's fascinating and not all in a bad sense. In fact, we should have a Digg-like "best 100 best statuses of the day" site.
Point of the matter is: If you don't want your statuses to be public, adjust the settings. At this age and time arguing most users don't know how to do this or were somehow duped is appalling.
Why? Most users really don't understand the consequences of the default settings, let alone which checkbox has which effect.
Just the other day I was browsing CNN and to great surprise a section on the site named a HN user as recommending that I should go and check out some link. Turned out it was powered by facebook and I had made the mistake of not logging out.
That's something that won't be happening again, but I'm not sure I could have predicted that sort of thing would happen.
And I'm definitely not comfortable with it.
For me, facebook has changed from a place where I share some stuff about me with my friends to a shingle for people to get in contact with me through other means.
I will not delete my account because that is a useful function, but my facebook days as an active user are mostly over (not that anybody cares or should care).
(Your reaction is partially justified due to the existence of Instant Personalization on Yelp, Pandora, and Docs, which does share information without your consent.)
I wonder how normal people respond when they see that.
And before you say it, no, this didn't affect 'most' Facebook users, but these aren't the only ones leaving their privacy settings on default.
http://youropenbook.org/?q=hottie223&x=0&y=0&gen...
[edit] Nevermind, as I scrolled down, the profile pictures started repeating, guess it's just ordinary spam[/edit]
My Facebook profile is "open" by default [1] ( particularly my status updates) but I can't get my statuses to show no matter what queries I try.
Has anyone been able to nail down:
- what exactly gets pushed into this feed
- what privacy settings remove you from or ad you to the feed
(kmavm, anything you can add in here?)
Ironically, this is the very same feature that I prostrated myself over here when it was down for a few hours 8 days ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1333000). Which way do you want it, HN? :)
If I can preempt the inevitable flood of "How do you sleep at night???" variants: note that you can't really use this to target an individual user. There are 400 million people using Facebook. If you query something embarassing, you might see some titillating content go by, but that doesn't prove much of anything. Those same search terms typed into Twitter search, or for that matter Google, turn up a lot of material that I would not choose to share, but these people have apparently chosen to do so. If you really want to invade privacy, stream search would be a spectacularly stupid way to do it; any given result has a 1 in 400 million chance of being from who you're looking for.
Like Google, Twitter search, and every search box on every web site ever in the history of anything, this search feature is privacy-neutral: it only allows you to see what you were already allowed to see. Does the fact that Google'ing for "my rectal surgery" uncovers some over-sharing make Google, or the web, evil? Or is it at least possible that the good done by answering legitimate queries outweighs this apparent harm?
For sure the latter.
We should make a tutorial on online privacy management though.
when I type an email I have an expectation that only I and the recipient will see the email.
similarly, a vast majority of these people are not intending to broadcast these updates into the public space (non-anonymously with a photo of their face attached next to the update)
I personally don't have any moral outrage over this, but that is the issue. You've built up an expectation of privacy with people and then took it away without enough user messaging. One dialog if I remember correctly, saying something along the lines of "Share your updates with everyone." (what does "everyone" even mean?)
tldr: you switched the defaults on people and they haven't realized it.
[citation needed]
As it stands, I can only presume your defensiveness and your obviously nonsensical comparisons to twitter (a system where everyone knows that everything is truly public) make me think you know, deep down, that your employer has made some bad decisions.
I'm curious: does facebook train their employees to identify themselves as employees then to rail angrily and arrogantly at people who have privacy concerns, or is that your own initiative? Either way I'm unsurprised by it. Facebook seems like the sort of place where such utterly unprofessional behavior would be the norm.
Facebook: unilaterally changing your privacy settings then berating you and making disingenuous comparisons when you get upset about it since 2004.
Clearly not.
That said, HN isn't a place for trolling. I don't think anybody appreciates the way you're distorting people's concerns so that you can mock them.
You're smart enough to understand that the problem is not that 'public information is public', but rather that FB's habit of changing and hiding settings makes it hard to tell what is public. As such, your entire rant was not just off-topic, it was an insult to everyone with a valid concern, and every single member of the HN community who would be interested in a legitimate conversation.
So please... troll elsewhere. We don't need your kind here. This is supposed to be a place of discussion, not a place where angry FaceBook engineers insult FaceBook users with a barrage of irrelevant bullshit.
The evidence being offered here (people writing public status updates with mildly titillating strings in them) has nothing to do with the claim that Facebook users don't understand Facebook privacy. In contexts where we all agree that the users understand the privacy model (twitter, plain ol' html), the same experiment produces the same results: people over-sharing.
If you wish to demonstrate the claim that Facebook users don't know what they're doing, this does nothing to convince those who do not already agree with you.
I can't even fathom how anybody could look at such a system and claim that the users all understand the ramifications with a straight face.
It's really insulting that you're trying to sell such an utterly asinine claim by pointing out that people sometimes overshare on twitter, in blog comments, and in line at Starbucks. The FB privacy system is broken by design.
Search just happens to offer an amusing window into content that is, in all likelihood, x% people who would overshare anyway, and 100-x% people who thought they were just talking to their friends, or friends + FoF, where x is nearly guaranteed not to be 0 or 100.
There are some complex corners of FB's privacy system; e.g., some of the ins and outs with photos are pretty subtle. However, status updates are one of the more clear areas: Q: Who can see this? A: Everyone.
Finally, with respect to the "trolling" charge, I am only human. Those HN readers who are also Facebook users, thanks for putting food on my family's table, and I'm truly sorry, and professionally humbled, if our product has let you down. However, this is not a Facebook customer support forum; it is a community of technologists, and it would be condescending not to speak to HN as if I'm speaking to my peers. I think the silence of my fellow Facebook engineers on threads like this one, while showing admirable restraint, has left the bogus impression that we do not talk, think, or care about the implications of the products we build. We do, and a searching, frank dialog with our more technically minded users, which will necessarily include argument, can help us figure out how to make things better.
I hope the intention was clear: with 400 million users, it is a certainty that a feature will be incomprehensible, unusable, etc., to some non-zero number of users.
I'm now wondering what the rigorous way to describe the phenomenon you describe is. Something like, as the number of realizations of a random variable increases, the probability of seeing a realization below a given threshold approaches one. This sounds a lot like some of the theory related to hypothesis testing but it's been too long.
I, personally, would like to hear both sides' arguments. So, please exclude myself from your version of 'we'.
Also, how's it supposed to be a place of discussion, if we have 100 people here saying 'FB is bad, very bad', and 0 people saying 'it's not as bad as it seems'. Doesn't sound like a productive discussion to me.
He mocked a legitimate user concern (FB privacy confusion) with his "How do you sleep at night???" comments, in which he portrayed anybody with this concern as hysterical and irrational.
Search doesn't cause the problem (it merely exposes and exacerbates it), but it's a legitimate problem. And it's ridiculous for a FB employee to go around mocking those of us who had to talk our parents through a more than 100 click privacy-restoration process over the phone. (Especially when our parents are over 70, and not the fastest clickers in the West.)
If he wants to mock people for holding that concern, he's a troll, plain and simple.
And if you think that mocking people by putting imagined hyperbolic rhetoric in their mouth is civil and cogent, well... I suppose we have different definitions of civil and cogent.
----
edit: p.s. calling somebody a name is not an ad hominem, it's an insult. Here's a helpful example:
ad hominem: mos1 is wrong because he's an asshole.
insult: mos1 is both wrong and an asshole.
I for one want to hear from kmavm - he has raised some clear points.
All in all... why don't we leave the sniping to one side.
Unfortunately instead of then admitting that it does exacerbate the issue, he then pretends that there is no issue, asserts that all FB users fully understand FB's privacy model and insults anybody who doesn't agree.
Something to think about: can you imagine a Zappo's employee arguing with concerned customers the way kmavm has?
Please, this argument is getting old.
And if "people" didn't mind, this probably wouldn't be getting so much attention.
The fact that Facebook really isn't reacting much to this outrage (albiet justified), farther solidifies the point that people who are vocal about it to the extend that they are ready to stop using Facebook is a very small minority and it will not effect them much, if at all. When you have 400 million users, do you really care losing 100k users who are most likely tech savvy and using Ad-blockers anyways?
I admit that the particular use of "not just a vocal minority" wasn't accurate, if you interpret it to mean that the majority of Facebook users are concerned. You could also interpret my statement as "there are more people than just a vocal minority who are concerned." My point is that this is a pretty big deal, not just something that HN readers are up in arms about.
This is just a fad and, annoyingly, it will pass ( like the google hate we had a couple of months back).
I'd love to be wrong. But I doubt it.
Those launching sites like this are just jumping on the bandwagon and will jump off just as easily without actually doing anything.
Edit: by the way. Everyone non-techy that I try and talk about this with just shrugs and says "yeh I checked them, it's cool". Same as they have for the last 18 months. This hasn't raised it's profile - yet (still hopeful)