Comment by jmillikin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmillikin | Hacker News Reader

The author's proposed solution is to give users the illusion of control, by adding a set of radio buttons to the settings dialog which claim to limit how "other people" can use a post. But the very strictest option is today's default, which people are protesting for being too permissive!

What people are actually asking for is a way to forbid Facebook itself from using or copying a post, which any technically- or legally-minded reader would interpret as forbidding Facebook from storing posts at all. Obviously most users don't actually want their account and posts to be deleted, but they're asking for just that, and become angry when Facebook does not comply.

If you are truly upset that a company somewhere is making money by hosting a service that you post your private life to, there are a couple simple solutions:

1) Find some registered non-profit with blog hosting (does this even exist?), and only post there.

2) Host your own site, set a password so only your friends can see it, and only post there.

3) Stop posting your private life online.

It's super, super silly that Facebook users feel so wed to the service that they demand a say in it's governance. Sorry, that's just not even close to how it works.

Your options are restricted to playing by Facebook's rules or leaving. It's okay to leave, it doesn't hurt at all, except for the occasional impulsive typing of 'faceb' into your URL bar before you remember what life was like before Facebook, and in fact, what it is like after it.

I find this mentality, one I've often found in the US, disturbing.

I've had the benefit of living the better part of a decade in Europe where data privacy protections are stronger, and there is a resulting expectation that companies can only do with customer-provided data what they had agreed to when it was supplied. That means only using data for the explicit purpose it was gathered and not changing or using the data for expanded purposes later.

It is bizarre to me to think that one should just accept that the receiver of the data can unilaterally expand the use of it later without informed mutual agreement.

The 'mentality' is that if you don't like what the site is doing with data, you should leave the site and not use it.

Do you use Facebook from Europe? If you are not using it, then you are probably not really disagreeing with what the parent said.

I really could have done without the anti-US bigotry here, it is flamebait and not entirely related to the topic

> 1) Find some registered non-profit with blog hosting (does this even exist?), and only post there.

dreamwidth.org is a for-profit org, but it strives very hard to be privacy aware.

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