Ask HN: Do you use Facebooks' new family tagging feature? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you use Facebooks' new family tagging feature?

3 pointsaharonovich7 comments

Facebook supports smart family tagging, @dad would tag your dad, if you've indicated this relationship. However, sharing this information with facebook does raise some privacy questions.

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Is there a Darwin award for online behavior?

That bad?

What are the benefits to users - save the difficulty of remembering their own parent's names? At one time, younger users were avoiding Facebook to avoid having public online conversations with parents. Danah Boyd has published on this topic, she would have a more informed opinion, http://www.danah.org/itscomplicated/

Perhaps Facebook could create a location where they could receive free technical advice on new product features and whether they would be helpful to their customers and society, with public votes and feedback? This could be done for roadmap features originated within Facebook and for user-generated roadmap requests.

As for privacy, is there economic value in DNA/SNA information harvesting by Facebook bots?

For me the benefit is obvious - Since I never call my parents by their names and only address them as dad\mom it's much more natural for me to @dad when I'd like him to see something. In fact, that's how I've stumbled upon this feature. Using FB when very tired and just accidently wrote @dad instead of @<his name>. Indeed it would be awesome if Facebook crowdsourced their road map, that's a great idea.

If FB wants to support privacy, they would ensure those abbreviations are not reflected in public conversations.

The best solution for users would client-side app/context text expansion that is independent of the backend web service. iOS has global text expansion (keyboard shortcuts) and Android has 3rd-party keyboards.

They are not reflected. Let's say someone dad's name is David, when he tags @dad the tag would read 'david'.

i dont use it, its a hassle and others might not want to be tagged

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