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Comment by jasonss | Hacker News Reader

Disclaimer: I work at Facebook. I share photos and videos of my kid in a secret FB group where I have to approve membership. It has worked pretty well, I'd encourage you to try it!

https://www.facebook.com/addgroup

Alternatively you could create a list of all the people you want to see this content and restrict visibility to that list when you post.

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This might work unless facebook decides to change the privacy settings so the pictures are suddenly not private anymore.

No thanks!

I consider everything I send to a server with facebook in its name to be public. Maybe not now, but in the near future. Just like twitter.

Yeah sorry, but I would never trust Facebook with anything private. One example: I used lists for years, selectively shared data with different people. One day Facebook gets Google+ envy and now the names of the lists I shared with is public. Imagine all the people with lists labelled "hot girls" or similar? An absolute violation of privacy.

There was the recent bug that allowed viewing of personal photos via the report dialog. There have been problems with application tokens allowing data to be compromised. And Facebook has a history of resetting privacy settings when it suits them.

How about when smart lists came out? I already had a Family list, so I followed the instructions and merged it with the new smart list. Then I found out that adding people to that smart list sent them a request to confirm family relationship. So I had to create a new list (I appended a dash) and move everyone to that. The thousands of posts I'd tagged hiding or showing family were now visible or hidden incorrectly, and I just about killed my account in despair.

If you're smart enough to work at Facebook, you should be smart enough not to trust your data to that company.

Sorry for ranting. I'm just incredulous at the whole idea.

Everyme is an app that works REALLY well on all platforms for your purposes, not just pretty well. I would encourage you to give it a try. You might like it better.

I've used the Facebook secret groups feature and found it sufficient. Could you elaborate on what non-trivial benefits you offer over those? As far as privacy from the provider, it seems like I would have to trust you instead of Facebook, which from my point of view isn't a huge net gain.

Feature wise FB may be ok, but from the user experience perspective they have failed to offer anything remotely attractive on the mobile. This is what makes apps like Path and Everyme attractive, they were designed with mobile in mind.

Plus their mobile platform straight up sucks. It takes ages for mine to load (on iphone 3gs) on wifi or 3g. Even then, some of its capabilities are hobbled. I was trying to do something the other day (i dont remember what), but was very frustrated at not being able to do it.

Where to begin - first, our apps perform at least 30x better. Facebook mobile apps sometimes lag for 30 seconds or more loading new content, ours is instantaneous. Our app was natively built for all platforms. Second, we are backwards compatible with email and text. I think FB might handle email replies as well but text is huge on mobile and is a big deal for our users. Third, we can build your groups automatically for you with Magic Circles. Fourth, we are hooked into all major social networks and are constantly scanning for interesting events occurring in your life. When we find those events, we post them to your Circles for you (if you have the setting turned on) - this takes the effort out of sharing. There's more but I encourage you to try the app and see for yourself how much better it is.

Do you actually use the Push service? If you do, I would err with the side of caution since it shakes up the battery pretty bad.

We use APNS and C2DM, but you can turn them off if you're concerned.

Well, if I create secret groups and add my friends and others add me to their secret groups, I will be in about 50 secret groups - which doesn't make sense. Also, managing groups, like circles in very cumbersome. That's where apps like Path & Pair help a lot.

I've considered doing this as well, but I can't get myself to trust Facebook to keep my photos my property.

Hello, just curious, why is your child so secret?

Do yourself a favor - read this.

'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID1098449_code...

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