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Please update your Facebook privacy settings

24 points| fuelfive | 16 years ago |frog.posterous.com | reply

18 comments

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[+] thechangelog|16 years ago|reply
No doubt.

I've been very careful to ensure that my FB profile is as locked-down as possible, yet last night when I was uploading the latest round of baby photos I caught, out of the corner of my eye, that the album was public by default.

If a technically-inclined person like me can find this difficult, what chance does the general public have?

[+] ryanjmo|16 years ago|reply
If you really want your FB profile to be private, you should remove it from Facebook. I don't know if you have noticed by now but Facebook is essentially an open platform. Get the clue, remove anything you want to be be private from Facebook and stop complaining.
[+] pak|16 years ago|reply
...Arctan? Haha, what the hell is that?

This does well to illustrate what a fiendishly difficult thing it is for a typical Facebook user to maintain privacy settings, and how difficult it must be for Facebook to actually adhere to this rigamarole in every view, API, feed, et al. presented by their site. (And they do screw that up from time to time.)

Part of the reason I think they want to "simplify" privacy by making more stuff open is because it is such a royal pain to implement. Compared to Twitter, the logic that must go into every database query to determine viewability of friends or comments or pictures must be ridiculously complex. The current ability to group friends into lists is roughly equivalent to implementing ACLs on groups, which is just as much fun for the user to set up and maintain as it is for a programming team to get working (not fun at all).

[+] psyklic|16 years ago|reply
If they really wanted to simplify privacy, they would have simplified it. Making some "Privacy Level" presets then allowing tweaks for advanced users is not that difficult.
[+] cmelbye|16 years ago|reply
It wouldn't be that difficult, just a conditional or two for a piece of content that may not be visible to someone. If I remember correctly, they have a dedicated privacy team that works on stuff like this, right?
[+] alttab|16 years ago|reply
What is truly missing is: "Opt me out of all open graph APIs - make me invisible"
[+] ryanjmo|16 years ago|reply
Yes, you can easily do this. All you have to do is erase your Facebook profile. If you need help doing this, let me know.
[+] chronomex|16 years ago|reply
Well, then it wouldn't be an "open" graph.
[+] char|16 years ago|reply
Seriously? This is not even remotely what adjusting Facebook privacy settings is like.

At the risk of being down-voted due to lack of agreement, Facebook is an opt-in service. They are making their priorities and privacy changes abundantly clear.

Concerned? Opt-out of using Facebook.

[+] ryanjmo|16 years ago|reply
Every time I see a comment on hacker news that is sympathetic to Facebook's privacy policies it gets down voted.

I don't get it; do the monitors of HN not think the users of hacker news are intelligent enough to decide if Facebook's privacy policies are positive/negative on their own?

Or to put in another way... Why do pro-Facebook privacy policy comments continually get down voted?

[+] ohashi|16 years ago|reply
Sadly, I was hoping to find some secret setting to I didn't know I should have turned on/off.
[+] tstegart|16 years ago|reply
Goodness. Today I was surfing CNN.com and it had my friend's updates embedded into the sidebar. I was like, WTF? Seriously Facebook?