Facebook's Privacy Dinosaur Wants to Make Sure You're Not Oversharing | Hacker News Reader

Facebook's Privacy Dinosaur Wants to Make Sure You're Not Oversharing

slate.com

29 pointsctice13 comments

> it’s in Facebook’s interest to get us all to overshare

Could that absurd legend get buried already? It’s their obvious, direct commercial interest to keep your private information reserved for themselves, to improve proprietary targeting. The over-sharing might be Zuckerberg’s openness ideology against his company commercial interest.

> just imagine how worthless Yelp would be if a majority of its users turned their reviews to “private” or “friends-only.”

Well, I don't know about Yelp, but my Facebook NewsFeed has mainly friends’ updates. There are some advertising, but I doubt the advertisers feel their privacy violated by those.

Facebook does not really care who you share your posts with. It does care that you stay on Facebook so that it can charge Coke and Nike and other big brands huge dollars to put their posts into your timeline. So, making you feel a little better about Facebook security could mean more money on their bottom line.

Also, over-sharing to too broad an audience pollutes the feeds of those users with likely irrelevant info, making the entire property less appealing to those users. I don't think this has anything to do with altruism.

Am I the only one who sees double meaning in using a "dinosaur" to help remind people about "privacy"? Or maybe I'm just reading too far into it.

Little bit, yes. It is a cute thing. That can be all it is. They did not need to do this at all. It is unlikely that they are trying to insert subliminal negative messages at cross purposes to the dialog box.

I wonder: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_(mascot)

(For a minute I thought it was a Firefox dinosaur, in which case the derivation would have been far more obvious.)

relevant> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godzilla

Uh, yeah, that's why it's called "Mozilla" with a "Zilla" and the end...

Queue the report showing that users who review their privacy/sharing settings on Facebook end up sharing more, not less...

The article already addresses that concern:

> You might suspect this is actually a clumsy attempt on Facebook’s part to get people to change their settings from “friends” to “public.” But it isn’t, at least for now: A Facebook spokesman told me the only people seeing the pop-up box in the current test are those who are already posting publicly on Facebook. From Facebook’s perspective, then, this feature can only lead to one thing: Fewer people sharing publicly.

Does anyone have the image link for the privacy dinosaur?

So next gen clippy?

You mean 65-millions-ago gen?

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