When the Most Personal Secrets Get Outed on Facebook | Hacker News Reader

When the Most Personal Secrets Get Outed on Facebook

online.wsj.com

35 pointsk-mcgrady8 comments

"Their unfortunate experience reminds us that we must continue our work to empower and educate users about our robust privacy controls."

More bullshit from Facebook. Instead of accepting that it's a privacy issue to allow people to subscribe you to groups without warning, they say that it's the fault of these users for not knowing about these settings. It's infuriating. They keep changing settings to make Facebook more and more public, and telling people that privacy is an option that you need to enable.

Wow totally agree with you about this. What is scary is when you hear predictions by Wall Street experts, on Facebook's future, they don't even mention the possibility of severe backlash to the the privacy Facebook has stolen from everyone. Its only a matter of time before kids either shun Facebook or become masters at creating false identities that make the network even more useless. It sucks that so many smart people are being used for this garbage.

Facebook is already ahead of you. Data poisoning is mostly useless now. They've utilized SS-tactics to have friends report each other if their information is incorrect. Much of this isn't explicit, either.

In a few short years, they have locked in users, expanded to younger groups of people, leeched into people's browser histories, logged phone numbers and GPS coordinates, and altered existing privacy settings so much that the very idea of privacy in the network is a farce.

Facebook has become the most engaging, entertaining, and self-sufficient molestation of society's values, to the point where companies like Netflix are asking congress to reconsider decades-old privacy laws so that they can keep up with the needs of the youngest generations.

It's disgusting. And I'm a user. Because quitting would be social and academic suicide.

And I'm a user. Because quitting would be social and academic suicide.

Do you really believe that? I've never joined, and never seen the attraction myself. It hasn't affected my professionally or personally, I think one person has asked about it (an old school friend). I do think the use of the word suicide here is hyperbole. Surely you don't actually pursue serious academic work through FB?

Personally I think taking part in Facebook intensively could lead to problems later in your social/work life, when all the data for decades of your personal and work life and that of all your friends is available for data-mining by anyone willing to pay for it. The same applies to other social networks of course if you use them frequently, but FB has the illusion of privacy which the others don't.

"Facebook declined to make Mr. Zuckerberg available." That quotation from the article reveals some kind of double standard.

Privacy on facebook: Like a changing room with a 1 way mirror, behind which there are cameras, and a live-stream to the interwebs. No one would ever strip naked in the middle of public. But the illusion of privacy, is a feint. [1] Absolutely brilliant, Jedi mind trick.

______

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feint | http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kizeme

EVERYTHING you post on Facebook is potentially public, so treat it as such. Facebook wipes your privacy settings with alarming frequency. You're one "forward" or "share" away from internet notoriety.

If you're afraid about your secrets getting out, encrypt them and don't let them leave your personal hard drive. Because, in accordance with Murphy's law, everything else will eventually become public.

Not applicable here --- the two people in this case were outed by somebody else posting private information more widely than he intended. (By adding them to a public group, which he didn't anticipate would broadcast the news to their friends and family --- and I'm not sure I'd expect it to be obvious that it would.)

The only cure in this case would be to unfriend anyone who shouldn't potentially know everything that you or anyone else has entered on Facebook. Which is often not a practical idea for those with delicate family issues.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com