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Comment by Jun8 | Hacker News Reader

Has FB bashing fallen to this level, querying "going to the strip club" and listing the results with a big "see, I told you so"? I scrolled through maybe two hundred of the "strip clubbers", most seem to be the kind of people who put this in their status updates for sensationalist value, judging from their pictures.

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.

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> 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).

CNN doesn't get any of your Facebook data. It's an iframe hosted on Facebook. That HN user wants people to know that he likes that article.

(Your reaction is partially justified due to the existence of Instant Personalization on Yelp, Pandora, and Docs, which does share information without your consent.)

An iframe is an implementation detail, when I'm wearing my 'user' hat I see stuff on CNN that shouldn't be there. Whether it is technically hosted elsewhere is of interest but to a user it probably does not matter much.

I agree that it appears that Facebook may be sharing data without users' approval. I was just pointing out that they aren't in this case.

I wonder how normal people respond when they see that.

True, CNN doesn't get your Facebook data directly, but if FB automatically creates a connection and CNN gets added to your interest then, if i have understood correctly, that network can see at least basic info about you.

That was a bug that I believe has been fixed. Connections should never be made automatically.

Don't you remember the incident just a short while back that revealed how many Facebook users Google 'facebook login'? These weren't necessarily 'stupid' people, they just wanted to check on their friends and share what's new with them. Anything else (like learning a bit about how the internet works) is just an annoyance.

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.

Really it should be the opposite way around. Anything on facebook should be private by default (only viewable by friends), with an opt-in to make it public (anyone on the internet can see it). Only a minority of the population are exhibitionists who want drunken pictures of themselves to be made universally visible.

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