Comment by kmavm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kmavm | Hacker News Reader

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It's because they're thin wrappers around Facebook's stream search, a feature we shipped in July of 2009. The actual search engine is Facebook's. These projects are just hitting an ajax endpoint with a query and dressing up the results.

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?

sorry not the same.

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.

> a vast majority of these people are not intending to broadcast these updates into the public space

[citation needed]

> 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.

Your argument would be a lot more plausible if Facebook didn't have a habit of resetting peoples privacy settings, and if those settings were clearly, easily and permanently settable.

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.

Thanks for reminding me to emphasize that I'm speaking for myself, not my employer here. I write code for a living, I don't do PR.

I don't do PR.

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.

That's a little harsh. If facebook engineers won't come here to say stuff like this how are they going to get a different opinion. I say let them come and tell them what you think, but don't repay in kind.

Let me spell out my argument more explicitly:

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.

It takes over 100 clicks to make a FB profile completely private, and the settings aren't permanent. That's clearly a business decision. You don't need to be a UX expert to understand the aggregate effects.

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.

You're asserting what you seek to prove: that some large fraction, perhaps a majority, of Facebook users do not understand who can see their status updates. It is absolutely true, of course, that some users do not understand who can see their status updates; the law of large numbers assures us of that. So, we actually agree on the fundamentals of the situation: some users don't understand who can see their status updates. The question is, how many? What is your actual guess? 0.1%? 1%, 10%, 50%? What percentage would be acceptable, given that 0% is not achievable no matter what?

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.

Very well put with respect to trolling. I, for one, appreciate the public dialogue. One nitpick: the law of large numbers doesn't mean what you intended here.

You're right: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers

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.

Yes the intention was clear, and I agree.

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.

So please... troll elsewhere. We don't need your kind here. This is supposed to be a place of discussion

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.

Oh come on. If you think that was trolling, you don't know what trolling is. He was civil and presented a cogent argument. The fact that you disagree with him does not give you the right to lob ad hominems.

Let's be clear: he threw the first grenade.

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.

To be honest here; while kmavm has been showing "bias" by virtue of being a Facebooker he's presenting a reasonably valid view.. you are the one that appears to be on the verge of trolling/abusing (I realise that might not be intentional - so here's a heads up of how it looks).

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.

I've only seen one legitimate point from him: that search isn't the root cause of the privacy problem.

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?

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