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Comment by dotBen | Hacker News Reader

Rod Begbie asked a great question at the top of the Q&A... "How do I take down the address of my home if it gets listed and becomes popular such that FB makes it public?" (FB said that popular locations become public if enough people check in, so imagine you are having a party at your house...).

The answer is you can't, and Facebook clearly hadn't thought of that in their user stories and use cases. The group on stage didn't seem to feel it was an issue either.

For all of Chris Cox's pretentious guff (dude, give me a break) about their interest in sociology and FB respecting the "3rd place" concept, I think it shows how out of touch with "IRL" issues FB product development is. I feel they see everything as a 'data problem to solve' not the people + human behaviors that are really going on.

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Imagine how bad it would be if someone's "Having coffee at work" tweet/facebook message was public!! Then people could look up their name in the phone book and rob them!

Oh wait.. even worse! Imagine if everyone worked basically the same hours - then people could predict when your house is likely to be empty and rob them!!

Oh wait.. we already have that. Better panic already I guess.

First, we don't have it on the scale of Facebook yet.

Second, everyone knows their Twitter/FourSquare posts are going to be public. Not so with FB.

Third, Facebook is the one with the established reputation of making public by default user information that many assume to be private.

I think the point is less about telling people that you're away and more about publicly broadcasting the location of other people's private information.

I can assure you I'm not a privacy nut, but I think we all have the right to keep the latitude and longitude of our homes hidden from 500 million other people if we want.

About that: http://pleaserobme.com/

This doesn't make Facebook, Foursquare et al evil. People should know better. However, common sense should tell these companies it's probably best to keep home addresses private to avoid law suits/scandals. It just seems like the right thing to do.

heck, they could just walk up to your house, knock on the door, and if no one answers - rob the house!

The answer was interesting though: there had to be social proof behind a place before it would be available to a larger audience. In other words, even if somebody maliciously added your apartment as a place to checkin, barely anybody would see it unless they were in your direct network of friends.

well, from what I heard the more popular a place is the more public it becomes to the point that it could be come 'totally public' if it reaches a threshold (no mention what they are, though).

And as they were clear to state all the way through - this is about creating persistent stories that are permanently attached to a place page on FB - so presumably your home's place page becomes public.

That concerns me about having private parties in private homes (pretty typical use case)

"That concerns me about having private parties in private homes (pretty typical use case)"

I'd be interested in finding out how they calculated popularity in this case. How many parties and how well-attended would they have to be in order to automatically make a home a public place?

Knowing Facebook, I'd expect something ridiculously low at first, then public outrage, then small adjustments until people actually swallow it.

Perhaps the becoming 'totally public' of a place is contingent on the non-intersection of the sociality of some x number of checkins. I.e., if you have a party at you place but everyone who checks in is within 1-2 degrees of your social graph, then Facebook recognizes it's a well known place within a very local user subset. And doesn't make it public.

Also — time could be a simple indicator. If a place (i.e., your house) suddenly has 100 checkins over one day only to have no serious checkin traffic again for weeks, then that wouldn't be a completely public location either.

Could be... we don't know.

The lack of transparency and the potential downside is concerning, no?

Would you trust Facebook's algorithms for this? Facebook still tries to suggest I care about distant friends' Farmville updates.

This is going to be hilarious when 4Chan or some other spontaneous group figures out how to game the system.

edit: this is also why they shouldn't be called engineers or scientists. They're charlatans with their supposed interest in sociology. If they were proper computer scientists/software engineers, they would have fully thought through what would happen.

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