Hacker News Reader

Comment by raimondious | Hacker News Reader

The issue isn't Facebook's controls, it's user behavior, and there's little anyone can do about it.

I don't use Facebook because of this. There's not much the company can do to prevent people from making things public about you that you'd rather keep among friends. How is Facebook to know the implications of you being at one party vs another? Sharing is sharing. Just because you keep your profile locked down doesn't matter when someone else can share whatever they like with whomever they like. I understand not having a profile doesn't completely prevent this, but it helps make it a lot less public. Nobody will receive a notification linked to my profile that I was tagged in a photo because there's no profile to associate. We're past the point of being able to prevent this entirely, but I'm not going to make it any easier.

View on HN

Ummm...

the issue is facebook's controls.

If I add you to my group (without you even knowing), the system should not be sending out notices to all of your contacts that you 'joined' my group. You didn't join, you were added - there's a huge difference.

* the system should not be sending out notices to all of your contacts that you 'joined' my group*

- that's up to Facebook, and the parent is quite correct, if you don't your private life out there for all to see, don't put it on a social networking site because you don't have any control, other that what Facebook feel is in their interest to have. You give up that control when you put it online.

I have no sympathy for people that get found out because they put the information on Facebook and someone they didn't want to know saw it. People have to start taking responsibility for their own privacy and not crying to Facebook whenever this sort of thing happens. Also I tend not to believe most people because its an easy way to tell a burning secret without actually doing it, the confessors version of suicide by police.

tl;dr - don't put your secrets in the hands of facebook's whims because they aren't your best friend, they are a commercial business and your privacy isn't their concern, except when it suits them to be.

The point is that the users who were outed didn't "put secrets in the hands of facebook's whims" [sic], they were outed, when someone else assigned them to a group that the other person had created.

Simply put, you when someone assigns you to a group, by default you should get a notification along the lines of "So-and-so has added you to a group x. Are you part of group x?" Very much like how tagging in photos currently works, though I think there the default is to allow tagging.

I guess you're missing the respondent's POV - don't put anything, ever, in facebook, because ultimately they don't give two shakes about you or anything else other than making money.

Total answer to this is if the person wasn't on facebook, none of this would have happened.

True. But that's not a realistic solution for most people. It's like saying "don't have a cell phone". I mean, you can not do it, but you're out of a lot of people's loops.

The point of the article was that these people did everything right apart from that. They DIDN'T put anything on Facebook. They were added to a group without their approval.

Well, that could be the "answer" to every situation where someone got victimized. Participating in society of course opens you up to the possibility of being victimized.

How is the answer "don't participate in society" instead of "make society a better place?"

you should get a notification along the lines of so-and-so has added you to a group x

- so says you, but what you're entirely missing (again) is that it's entirely up to facebook what notifications they send and just because you think they should, because of your privacy concerns, doesn't mean that FB will because their concern isn't your privacy, but rather making money for their shareholders.

It's very simple. If I'm friends with you on FB I can create a group called "Gay HN users" and add you. If the user list of the group is public than and while you're sleeping all your friends will be notified that you're a member of the group even if you put them on restricted, because it's public.

This is a frankly idiotic line of reasoning.

Nobody is suggesting that facebook is now allowed to do this. We are suggesting that facebook should not do this.

> they put the information on Facebook

Except they didn't. Someone else did.

Except that's not correct. If you're on FB then anyone can tag you or put you in a group or any thing else they want. The simple solution is not to use a social networking site if you want to keep your social network private.

arguably, the fact that they had a profile on facebook at all means they 'put the information on facebook'. It's a weak argument, imo, but it's being made.

They did put just enough information to be dangerous on Facebook. The girl in this case did the following:

Joined FB and added her details (real name etc) (first mistake)

Added her dad as a friend, even though he objects to her private life (second mistake)

Added the Queer Choir group leader as a friend (third mistake)

So she now has two FB friends with diametrically opposite views, and wants to keep them completely compartmentalised. Trusting Facebook to do that given the beacon fiasco, and the multiple privacy slip-ups since, is not wise. Yes this is FB's fault for having bad defaults, but you can't trust FB to keep all your stuff private, because they really don't care, and have made this clear many many times in the past. Their business model is predicated on sharing your data with as many corporations and people as possible.

There are other ways to share photos and events which are not a ghetto cut off from the web, so it's better just not to join a club which insists all your acquaintances must join in order to share and then lets them know the intimate details of your life automatically.

> I have no sympathy for people that get found out because they put the information on Facebook and someone they didn't want to know saw it.

They didn't put the information on facebook. Someone else did and it looked like it came from them.

I agree this particular feature should be fixed, however fixing it doesn't solve the core issue of your contacts sharing information about you. This is the core functionality of Facebook I can't agree with, no matter how their privacy controls work.

The only issue is there is no real technical reason why individual A's friends need messaged when individual B took the action.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com