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Comment by donebizkit | Hacker News Reader

Why do we overcomplicate our analysis of social media and web 2.0? We all got on Facebook because it was new, it was fun, we shared pictures, we poked each other, we implicitly pried on our friends. Some of us got on Google+ because we were intrigued by what new it can bring to the table. The answer was none. Some of us stuck with Facebook because we're too lazy to manage two networks. Some of us continued on Google+ just to brag about having a Google+ account. Most of us didn't care about privacy, freedom, human rights or whatever mambo jumbo the media pundits were talking about, and who the hell cares who owns the data. it's just pictures and stupid text. we're just having fun at the end of the day. No need for philosophical analyses. It's just a game and once we get bored we'll move on.

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It's a lot more than pictures and text.

Jane goes to a party but doesn't want anyone who wasn't there to know. Jane's friends post pictures of her at said party. Now everyone who checks Facebook before Jane sees that she's been tagged in these pictures. Until now, Jane's never really considered that she should screen tags for approval first.

Jane has her profile available to anyone who is a friend of a friend. Jane's never considered that people who might have an interest in her may add any of her loose acquaintances or work friends. Any undesirable who happens to add one of her 'friends' now has access to her political beliefs, check-ins, address, cell phone number, favorite books, movies, music.

The problem is that the average person doesn't consider the implications of over-sharing or of Facebook's oversights in terms of privacy. Jane doesn't consider a _timeline of every major event in her life_ to be a problem because only 'friends of friends' can see it anyway.

It's foolish of you to believe this is just a game and that boredom is all it will take to pass. People put their lives on social media without a second thought.

if you put your life on social media without understanding the consequences, that is your own fault. i agree the average person doesnt understand the implications, but it is out of laziness that they do not (it's really not that complicated).

(if facebook changes their settings, that is one, thing, but if you are too lazy to look at what settings exist, that is not facebook's problem)

i totally agree that social media and facebook has become much more than pictures and text - it has a created a generation of people who want to take a picture every 5 minutes no matter how insignificant the event and upload them to "look cool". it has also created a generation of people that pour their heart and emotions out onto facebook to try to gain attention, likes, etc.

if that type of behavior comes back to bite them in the ass, im not sure it is possible to feel sorry for them though....

I don't pity the individual who gets bitten by his or her ignorance. I fear for consequences on a much larger scale. This ignorance, well, false sense of security, will likely have broader implications in the long run. The scale and where this leads is a much bigger problem than the individual being bitten.

Example: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/09/twitter-hands-ove...

Not only are there issues like this, but there are also various changes in privacy policies that lead to exposed information. That can't really be blamed on individual ignorance.

Jane didn't put her life on social media; her friends did.

The problem with Facebook is not what it enables or what settings it has -- it's the cultural shift, engineered by a single company, that it's socially acceptable to take pictures of your friends, post them publicly, identify them by name in a worldwide, searchable database, and preserve those pictures for eternity, all without Jane's consent.

That would have been an unthinkable invasion of privacy not twenty years ago, against an individual, and now we do that to everyone in society.

If people want to preserve their own actions, that's one thing, and it's fine not to feel sorry for them. If they want to preserve other people's actions without their consent, that's another thing entirely.

Real life anecdote.

I just use FB for saying yay/nay to events people organise, turned off tagging ages ago, etc. Tried shutting it down, but missed a couple of events or had to turn them down as I heard about them too late.

However somehow I still get tagged in stuff. Worse than this at some point I got tagged as going to Hooters, not once, but three times. All stag dos in my local city (popular stag do location).

So now FB reports that my favourite place in the world is Hooters. I keep meaning to figure out how to kill it, but seriously, WTF? I didn't do a thing but apparently I'm tit-obsessed according to FB.

Am I set to friend of friends? Probably.

>take pictures of your friends, post them publicly, identify them by name in a worldwide, searchable database

Facebook's data is only public if you want it to be.

No. It's also public if anyone you interact with wants it to be. I have no way to prevent someone else from taking a picture of me and uploading it to Facebook with my name attached.

This is the sort of behavior that used to be the realm of tabloid journalists and paparazzi and viewed as ethically uncool; now it's expected of everyone.

If you do it voluntarily, that's your own fault. But there's no way to prevent everyone you know from tagging you in photos even if you do your personal best to be private.

i have avoided being in photos at public events for this very reason for the past two years - it's really not that hard to avoid - more of a habit at this point

Well, I do that too, but I shouldn't have to. I also tend to get pressured into being in pictures. Some people have a tendency to get offended and/or being really persistent when someone doesn't want to be in a picture. I just hate being put in that position and my point is, I really shouldn't have to.

This is an impossible task. The more you go out in public, the more likely you are to be photographed and have that photo placed in a publicly viewable place online. Even untagged photos will be fair game with facial recognition running against public photos.

Thats a bit unfair, not everyone around the world understands the privacy implications, especially compared to a subsection of people on HN who've been awoken to this issue since the dawn of the net.

Yes that doesn't preclude people from being dense either - some people should and do know better as well.

I am saying that its a spectrum, and your point is valid for one chunk of that spectrum, but not its entirety.

> Jane goes to a party but doesn't want anyone who wasn't there to know.

Jane is an outlier.

Funnily, with even minor tweaking of circumstance, we are all outliers or base normal.

Let me finish that story for you ... Jane is embarrassed for couple of weeks. Jane realizes that she's not the first one in the world who lied about going to a party. A month later no one gives a damn about the story. Jane doesn't understand why the hell everyone in the media was talking about it as if it were the end of civil rights as we know them.

I see you neglected to read the rest of my post and didn't consider any of the possible implications of said party. A party unwittingly attended can cost many opportunities. Employment, friends, standing with family, and the party was only one example of many other potential problems. Look up the "girls around me" app. It's entirely feasible for a stalker to make use of information in these ways, and that's one of the more pleasant possibilities.

Friends can inadvertently reveal private data about other friends due to a mistaken sense of security by both parties. I don't understand how anyone can deny that this is a serious problem.

it is a problem - but it's not facebook's problem, it's your problem for not understanding the settings (obviously i do not mean you, i mean users). projects like beacon were facebook's problem, and they were wrong for doing that. if your using a product and dont understand how it works, then you only have yourself to blame. example (dated, i know):

Edit, I found a better example:

http://willmoffat.github.com/FacebookSearch/?q=playing+hooky...

I disagree that it isn't Facebook's problem or that you have only yourself to blame.

Facebook is aware of this problem, and it's good for their bottom line. It's not in their best interest to encourage privacy, so they don't. In fact, they actively work to encourage (or, in some cases, force) more sharing, less private behavior.

As there are serious risks, even dangers, involved in over-sharing (not just your over-sharing but your friends' over-sharing as well), I would say that Facebook has some responsibility to protect its users and inform them on the implications of playing fast and loose with privacy.

Cool, link!

"if your using a product and dont understand how it works, then you only have yourself to blame"

Don't we all do this each and every day? And even if you do understand how everything works, predicting the long-term consequences and ramifications can be impossible.

>> "Jane goes to a party but doesn't want anyone who wasn't there to know. Jane's friends post pictures of her at said party. Now everyone who checks Facebook before Jane sees that she's been tagged in these pictures. Until now, Jane's never really considered that she should screen tags for approval first."

There are privacy settings for this (which I use). You turn on an option that all tags (photos and posts) have to be approved by you before they appear on your timeline (and thus visible to your friends).

Exactly that

Or you make tagged photos of you not appear on your timeline (set their privacy to "Only you")

If you found out about this after a photo has already been tagged, you can just untag yourself

I address this. It was something of a weak example, but I do mention that Jane realizes her privacy settings were inadequate, at least for tagging. It's already too late at this point. That particular example was one of oversight on the part of the user. I considered it to be a good starting point.

If only that setting was enabled by default, so that Jane would be protected from having her privacy abused so that a company can make a nickel.

Ha ha! I know, crazy talk.

I'm betting most people don't care about this (this is what I see from my friends anyway). They want to be tagged. Therefore it makes sense that Jane would have to enable it. There's no point inconveniencing the majority of your users to satisfy the minority. If you really care about your privacy the first thing you would do using a service like Facebook is check your privacy settings.

There are privacy settings for this (which I use). You turn on an option that all tags (photos, posts, and check-ins) have to be approved by you before they appear on your timeline (and thus visible to your friends).

> Jane goes to a party but doesn't want anyone who wasn't there to know.

It's unnecessary to present this as a problem of social media. In fact anyone with a camera will present a problem to Jane, as they can make photos and show them to anyone, in real life. At least in the case of social media there are some technical solutions to limit that, but you can't go preventing arbitrary people from accidentally divulging that you were at some party.

Perhaps social media do amplify this situation because the information is more readily concentrated and reproduced, but the fundamental problem you present is the expectation of being able to control information when it can't be.

The problem I present is that Jane doesn't want anyone to know because she doesn't want undesirables, such as coworkers or family, to know. It's not likely that someone will vindictively send pictures of Jane having what they, if they were at the party to take pictures in the first place, likely consider to be harmless fun. The problem is unintentional damage, which, as you say, is amplified by social media.

That said, the party example was weak. I opened with it because it was an easy example of oversight on the part of the user.

This is a problem with social media, though. Before it, there would be a picture of me at a party that no one ever saw. Now, there is a searchable by name picture of me at a party that has been tagged along with every other picture of that party, with times, location, and other attendees determinable in the same way for each.

By the way, this will also be a picture that no one will see, except for the people that are interested in the fact that I'm going to parties, the people that I wanted to hide that fact from. The picture hasn't been made more interesting, it has just been attached to 100 or more indexes, with no lifespan.

This sounds like a specific, personal experience. It certainly doesn't describe anything I, myself, experienced. If I were to guess, I would say you are in your early 20s?

You surely understand that the description is a caricature of social media use. I am not saying, you or I have that experience but the point that I was making is that the majority of Facebook users, the teens and early 20s, as you're pointing, don't take any of this seriously. It's just one way of having fun until something else comes up. And that's why any competitor that enters this competition with a serious face i.e. we want to decentralize social interaction doesn't have a chance. The next Facebook killer will be something that's more FUN to use.

No, gosh no. Google+ has shared an album of mine entitled 'My Love and I', with a few snapshots of my girlfriend and I going for a walk by the river, with the people I met at a Hacker News meetup. Embarrassing.

It also recently inappropriately shared another photo with somebody who should only have seen one photo.

Google+ brought really shitty privacy to the table!

tl;dr: google+'s privacy settings are outstandingly bad.

A game you can usually walk away from without experiencing life altering change.

These social giants have mountains of information about millions (billions?) of people on this planet, and a legal right to keep it and do pretty much whatever they want with it.

This "game" will never end. Your save data will never be erased. You will likely be reminded of that for years to come.

It's just a game and once we get bored we'll move on.

This is why I never believed in Zynga. Casual games are casual. I never thought that they can capture the imagination of people over the long-term. It'd be really interesting of that axiom applies to the bigger picture of social also. It probably wouldn't, but who can tell what the future holds 10 years from now?

It's all fun and games until people get hurt: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/109ipi/no_faceboo... & http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/12/facebook_is_making_us_misera...

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