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Comment by luplex | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty sure Facebook is really careful around this stuff. it's illegal for them to ignore your previously made privacy choices. Facebook can't afford to break the law in such an obvious way.

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No, I’m going to give them full kudos here, not the cynical “they have to be careful because reasons” type of kudos, but the full-bodied rich in flavor type of kudos. I created my account in 2007 and would regularly check the privacy settings every time they made a change of any kind up to the point I stopped using and later removed the account over a decade later.

Not one privacy setting that I exerted manual control over ever changed out from under me. Whatever controversies they came under in that time with all the additional accompanying scrutiny, this aspect never changed. Perhaps there are counter examples out there, but that’s how it was for me.

FB is more careful about privacy than 98% of companies their size.

Do there exist 50 companies their size for that number to make sense?

I'd slightly modify that: FB is careful about privacy law, but its business model is about extracting private data.

One example: The NYTimes will sell your name + home address to other advertisers to send you mail. FB does not share your personal information with anyone, it just lets people serve ads to you on the platform based on it.

They are careful about privacy when you are careful of your own. There are millions of users who do not change the default settings.

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