Facebook privacy controls don't work even when you use them
sfgate.com
sfgate.com
But of course, it's filled with lots of capital letters, so he must be right.
Facebook is rapidly losing control of the narrative. They need to do some PR damage control quickly, or they're going to see this kind of fearmongering metastasize into something truly harmful to their business.
Just wait until a 'facebook allows sexual predators to stalk your children' story pops up and goes viral. I give it a week, two at the outside.
No, no! It really does. Because we can't support the idea that it is going to be reported wrong - how is that going to help?
> facebook allows sexual predators to stalk your children' story pops up and goes viral.
That doesn't need this privacy thing to make a story. Facebook is already one of the prime ways that predators contact and stalk children (after all it is only one friend acceptance that is required to skip past plenty of privacy controls).
Also, it's a silly story because childrens profiles are pretty solidly restricted (under all sorts of rules and guidelines).
More importantly; there has been a story here in the media for the last few months regarding a "predator alert" button. Organisations in the UK are trying to get chat providers to place it prominently on Childrens profiles. Facebook have declined and the story has been all about that refusal and how bad FB is.
But the public don't seem to care all that much.... I'm not convinced this privacy story will interest them much more...
citation needed?
It seems to me that a paedophile using Facebook to contact kids will be very visible with certain statistical analysis of user behavior.
> It seems to me that a paedophile using Facebook to contact kids will be very visible with certain statistical analysis of user behavior
I'm cautious of such methods - they aren't infallible, and what do you do with the results? Read their messages to be sure? Contact the police? Put a warning on their profile that others can see? All of that feels worrisome.
Really your kid being talked to by a pedophile is reasonably low probability. The chance of them being coerced into sending a photo or meeting them is also fairly low (for the most part those who use chat in this way aren't particularly predatory - they are more ill, or lonely and mislead. Not that this excuses them ofc).
Ultimately education of parent and kids seems the best solution.
But the case they use to justify this was a kid groomed by a paedophile on MSN, which does have the CEOP panic button, but no-one bothered to press it.
Basically CEOP are publicity whores who have just latched onto "won't someone think of the children!" as their vehicle to fame. And it seems to be working for them.
Especially as CEOP claim it is a "brilliant solution" when we tried to open a debate with them at a panel meeting....
I can see how it might be useful in a few circumstances (if done tastefully...) but a "big red button" is just silly, scaremongering and ultimately useless.
Orkut privacy settings fit in one tab. There are seven settings of which five have just two options. All in simple English. I don't need to read a blog article to understand them. What is your excuse, facebook?
That is not what I expected because I explicitly said that ONLY FRIENDS could see my bio, birthday and posts by me. I never authorized FRIENDS OF FRIENDS but so long as I have a shared friend with someone, they get to see my sparse profile.
When he stated earlier:
If a person has a mutual friend with me, they will find pretty sparse results searching me and should find NO results from any post I have made.
If you look at the posted image in the article, his birthday, bio, and posts are not showing (correct behavior). I think he may just have his terminology mixed up. The "posts" he is referring to google indexing are posts on the wall of a group or event, which aren't covered under "Post" privacy settings (which refer to your own wall posts).
I am all for some Facebook bashing, but reading this article makes my head hurt, probably because privacy settings can just get complicated.
I think the point is that if the privacy settings are so complicated that even computer literate people have difficulty understanding them, then fb is duplicitous in the sense that this just isn't (and shouldn't!) be so complicated and they are exploiting users' misunderstanding to their own benefit. Assuming, of course, that fb having more information to share and target ads against is to their benefit, which I think is true.
If fb wanted to make this right, they could start by giving you a simple set of settings, including one which reverted to the privacy settings of 2 or 3 years ago.
There have been at least half a dozen articles on Hacker News recently with exaggerated or incorrect claims about Facebook and privacy. I wrote about this "mob behavior" here: http://33bits.org/2010/05/10/facebook-privacy-public-opinion...
It is interesting that the discontent about Facebook has reached such levels that anything at all can kick up an outrage. It is also depressing that this is the top story on Hacker News. It is what I would have expected from Digg or Reddit.
While this is bad, it is also a huge privacy shift. Anyone remember the old Wired interview with Zuck, where he explicitly said that he was making it private, and a walled garden, on purpose, to get people to share more? Now, that has basically been reversed, and the communication from FBHQ has been sparse and done little to reassure or fix things.
I thought that, in a massive twist of irony, AdBlock had blocked a spammy article. Unfortunately it turns out that the article content is just completely missing (tried firefox, safari, and chrome).
You're missing the point. Facebook's privacy controls does not work for most people. It might work for Facebook employees or folks who are developing companies they want to sell to FB.
[citation needed]
In all seriousness I've been messing around with Facebook privacy for the last 18 months. Most of my friends are either a) unbothered or b) were perfectly capable of setting up their privacy
There was a little bit of a learning curve (this is what FB must must improve) but from my occasional tests/observation most people have locked up their profiles sufficiently.