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Comment by barell | Hacker News Reader

As I said I was developing Facebook apps back in 2011 and at this time as far as I remember, your friends list was publicly available to any logged in user. API was only making this easier for apps to fetch the data about you. There was an explicit permission about accessing friends list and their data through the API so yes, any of your friend at that time could just give away your profile to a third party.

I stopped using Facebook back in 2011 (only used it to manage and test my apps) as I was really concerned how easy is to collect personal data.

But I guess for me, as a developer, it is easy to imagine how things works and when to get suspicious online.

On the other hand it makes me really happy, Facebook privacy issues like this one with CA, got much attention and finally more people, hopefully, will understand how things works.

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It's not a matter of understanding. It's matter of, among other things, not allowing a friend to give away your data without your permission. I really don't understand how you cannot see that this is not a matter of 'understanding how things work' and instead a matter we can and should be pretty mad about...

By being friend with someone on Facebook you already make your data available to this friend. Your friend can show this data to anyone curious about you by showing his screen or by talking about what he saw on your profile.

An app on Facebook is only an automated way to ask your friend to share data he/she has access to. You cannot both share data with your friend and expect him/her to not be able to share it with 3rd parties.

If you don't want your friends to be able to share your data you don't become friends with them on a social network and/or you don't share data with them.

You don't tell to your acquaintances things you don't trust them to keep secret. And you can't expect them to keep secret things you share with every acquaintance

What happens when it's your Mother or Father?

I tell my relatives repeatedly to not take pictures of me if they're going to share them on those platforms. This whole thing is a problem with people's complatiency with technology and especially the coorporations taking advantage of it.

You know what? I, and I’m pretty sure a majority of people, would rather just regulate Facebook to death. You jump through hoops to maintain your privacy, I’ll lobby for change to existing laws. Meanwhile you tell people how they’re just not into computers enough, or not hard enough on friends and family.

Let’s see which prevails.

Whether this is intuitive for you as a developer isn’t the point. The point is that Facebook gave your friends permission to expose your data, without making this very clear at all to you. It seems hard to argue that this was in users’ best interests.

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