Randi Zuckerberg Also Confused About Facebook Privacy
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
Randi posted the picture as "friends only" but due to Facebook's policies it turns out that people other than those friends could see the picture.
First question: If a friend posts something as "friends only" are you ethically bound not to publicly share it? I think most people would answer YES, under the assumption that if they wanted to make it public they would have posted it publicly.
But there are a couple of interesting wrinkles here :
1. Facebook's interface did not make it clear to Callie that this was a "friends only" post. Because it showed up in her feed she assumed it was public and meant for public consumption.
2. The presence of Mark Zuckerberg in the picture. Zuckerberg is essentially a celebrity and it seems there is a widespread assumption that ANY picture with a celebrity in it (whether Justin Bieber or President Obama) is fair game for sharing in a way that does not apply to non celebrities. I think if the picture did not include Mark Zuckerberg it is far less likely Callie or anyone else would have thought it was appropriate to share it.
This is just products acting the way they do. Per #1, it's not our responsibility to divine (or even respect) what the real meaning of "Friends Only" is. #2 is irrelevant, if the subject matter wasn't as it is, a (minor) celebrity wouldn't be bringing the Streisand down on it. People reshare all the time, and in fact there are pages on FB entirely dedicated to the phenomenon that enjoy hundreds of thousands of reshares for their posts.
Do you have any specific examples?
We want to talk privacy with Mark Zuckerberg as well. We put a $2.5k bounty on it: https://businessleads.com/post/592-Mark-Zuckerberg-Wed-Like-...
I wonder if people would post differently if they saw how quickly their posts propagated through Facebook when people like and comment their public posts, or when people are tagged in their photos.
Honestly, it just shows that internet privacy, far from being just a "really hard problem" is essentially impossible. I'd prefer it if Facebook just dumped the pretense and made everything public from now on. At least then nobody would get the false sense of security and be fooled into thinking they can control who sees what they post online. It's all public, guys. Even Mark Zuckerberg's private family Christmas photos.
I'm unsure if Snapchat/Facebook put this unsexy disclaimer that would stop the behaviours people think the possible consequences of might be protected - however I'm guessing the virility from its sexiness and infamy would diminish greatly.
Yes, posting anything online should be assumed to be in the public domain. But that doesn't mean we should have to put up with the poor UX of unclear expectations and no visibility of what is going on.
http://jezebel.com/5971234/randi-zuckerberg-accidentally-sha...
I cannot say enough bad things about hat show.
It self-corrected.
We really could use a fantastic silicon valley focused TV/Video channel/site -- but I don't see it happening any time soon.
Ah, now I see why you continue your line of insistence here: the problem is that the person who publicized the photo wasn't supposed to be able to see it. The poster didn't know it would be seen by more people than just her friends.
Says who?
Her 12:36am tweet indicates as such: http://s3-ec.buzzfed.com/static/enhanced/webdr03/2012/12/26/...
I think we can all expect an FB permissions update in 1Q13 that touches on this experience of hers.
Schadenfreude and just desserts aside, Randi has a good point here. So much of the talk about privacy on social networks overlooks the problem of human nature. Most people won't have their privacy most painfully violated by a service, but by those in their network who carelessly forward their digital communications.
(to clarify: I'm not absolving FB of blame...I'm assuming that just about everyone here agrees that FB's privacy implementation is not great. I'm just saying that Randi's point, even if it was said to deflect responsibility, is true in the larger sense. As we'll find out as Poke w/ pics becomes more popular)
People can't be expected to ask before hitting "share" on a post shown as public, can they?
(Not to imply the parent thinks this way. Just that this seems to be yet another example of important information obscured by too-clever UI.)
There's also the ol' right-click/save.
When clicking on "Share" I can share it to all my friends on my time line (or if my default were public, it would share to everyone).
Even the recent article about switching two images very quickly can not solve this issue.
If your platform exists to form links between these (billions of) people, you have to either be extremely proactive with user's privacy (which Facebook clearly isn't), or you have to educate them to accept that anything they post should be treated as if it were public to the world, because basically it is (via 6 degrees of separation combined with Facebook sharing rules).
Wait, what? I work for a software company, and our marketing people (including up to Director level) are some of the least knowledgeable people when it comes to how our software actually works.
But that is different from knowing how the software actually works, what settings you need to turn on to achieve which result, and being able to explain why it is working the way it is. That is more of an engineering function, and knowing the details inside out is the job of not marketing, but of user education and training.
Somebody Randi shared it with used the tag (or comment) feature, which then caused it to show up in the feed of Randi's friends-of-friends. Those people had no idea that the image wasn't public (because they don't directly know her), and simply assumed it came through a public feed.
Randi thought that one of her friends somehow shared the image, which wasn't the case at all. They were simply using a common Facebook feature. She clearly misunderstood what was happening. And she acknowledged her misunderstanding by deleting her twitter comments on the matter.
Directly from Zuckerberg's tweet:
""@cschweitz not sure where you got this photo. I posted it on FB. You reposting it to Twitter is way uncool," Randi said in her tweet."
It was reposted to twitter. Randi shared a photo on Facebook. This person was able to see it because she was friends with Randi's sister (friend of friend). The user then took the photo from a semi-private space and shared it publicly on Twitter.
Maybe you need better marketing people?
If I hire a dozen of my high school friends to run a multi-million dollar company, it doesn't mean anybody knows what they're doing.