This is almost an argument for having open status updates: these are hilarious.
On the other hand, had I not just deleted my FB account, I would have been upset over this. Zuck's gang recklessly opens up whatever they see fit: it could easily and quite possibly be photos tomorrow and your wall the next day, and (as before: http://cl.ly/16wW) your "private" chats the day after that.
> ... it could easily and quite possibly be photos tomorrow ...
Your Facebook photos are not private at all. Anyone who has a URL to your photo can see it. In fact, anybody can access any file on FBCDN[1] as long as they have the URL to said file.
We share lots of Facebook pics on irc://irc.oftc.net:6667/#hackers-india. A lot of us don't have FB accounts, but those who do paste FBCDN URLs of interesting pics in the channel. Fun times :)
[1] FBCDN is Facebook's content distribution network
You can prevent that information from being public with a simple setting. I don't know why so many people are whining and bashing Facebook. It's a SOCIAL NETWORK. The entire point of it is to share information with people you know. Don't share what you don't want people to know, and lock down your settings (that they make quite easily available) to filter out the rest.
I can't stand this FB bashing. Zucks gang recklessly opening up whatever they see fit? It's a FREE SERVICE!
I guess it's just because I have always known that everything I put on the web is potentially kept around forever, that I generally don't put anything on there I would be embarrassed about someone else reading. These posts aren't exactly damning or anything, and this is certainly not enough to make me want to stop using FB. I actually enjoy seeing it open by default - like you mentioned, these are hilarious. I couldn't care less if everyone can see my wall though admittedly I'm not a heavy user. This is pure value-add in my opinion, a downside for only a very few.
After a few test searches I couldn't really find anything interesting. It's actually kind of amazing to see so many people saying basically the exact same things Strength in numbers? I learned some people I don't know are going to strip clubs. I learned some people I don't know are watching TV shows and movies. I also learned that people I don't know are eating various things and they are yummy. Is this something to be concerned about? People who have friends & family on Facebook, so the vast majority of the users, are already self censoring.
No no no no no, that's not what those graphs show. They all hit 100%. It's growing extremely quickly, but the graph shows nothing more. By the same graphs + the flawed interpretation, in July 2008, "Batman robin" accounted for every Google search. Look! 100%! http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=Batman%20robin&...
Why do I see this continually misinterpreted? The "learn what these numbers mean" link is pretty darned clear, and it can easily be grokked by doing more than one search.
I think this addendum the user whose tweet you posted has describes it quite well: http://cl.ly/18ax
Twitter users, unless they protect their tweets (in which case you're not searching though them: surprise!), know that everyone can see their tweets. Facebook users have "friended" the people they want to see their status updates.
Either you're genuinely confused, in which case I hope I've cleared things up, or you're using this as a red herring.
Has FB bashing fallen to this level, querying "going to the strip club" and listing the results with a big "see, I told you so"? I scrolled through maybe two hundred of the "strip clubbers", most seem to be the kind of people who put this in their status updates for sensationalist value, judging from their pictures.
I also queried "I love my wife", "I love Shakespeare", "quaternions" and wound up wasting more than an hour on this site. It's fascinating and not all in a bad sense. In fact, we should have a Digg-like "best 100 best statuses of the day" site.
Point of the matter is: If you don't want your statuses to be public, adjust the settings. At this age and time arguing most users don't know how to do this or were somehow duped is appalling.
> At this age and time arguing most users don't know how to do this or were somehow duped is appalling.
Why? Most users really don't understand the consequences of the default settings, let alone which checkbox has which effect.
Just the other day I was browsing CNN and to great surprise a section on the site named a HN user as recommending that I should go and check out some link. Turned out it was powered by facebook and I had made the mistake of not logging out.
That's something that won't be happening again, but I'm not sure I could have predicted that sort of thing would happen.
And I'm definitely not comfortable with it.
For me, facebook has changed from a place where I share some stuff about me with my friends to a shingle for people to get in contact with me through other means.
I will not delete my account because that is a useful function, but my facebook days as an active user are mostly over (not that anybody cares or should care).
Don't you remember the incident just a short while back that revealed how many Facebook users Google 'facebook login'? These weren't necessarily 'stupid' people, they just wanted to check on their friends and share what's new with them. Anything else (like learning a bit about how the internet works) is just an annoyance.
And before you say it, no, this didn't affect 'most' Facebook users, but these aren't the only ones leaving their privacy settings on default.
Really it should be the opposite way around. Anything on facebook should be private by default (only viewable by friends), with an opt-in to make it public (anyone on the internet can see it). Only a minority of the population are exhibitionists who want drunken pictures of themselves to be made universally visible.
This is interesting actually. Browsing some common keywords it seems that out of 200 million users very few seem to have open status updates compared to the same test 6 months ago the number has more than halved.
Probably the best example of why Facebook's privacy policy is broken. If you do a search for "drunken" I'm sure that most of these people only intended the photos to be viewed by their friends. Such material could easily be used to embarrass, bribe, bully or discriminate against people in job applications.
I think it's pretty obvious that once you put your photos on your Facebook (or other social media channel) profile they are pretty much public. I don't really understand why people would upload sensitive information about themselves in the first place.
There are a bunch of fake profiles that includes all the default search keywords. While that's fun, it may destroy the authenticity of the message this site is trying to spread.
Interesting, that's almost a carbon copy of another project that someone showed here a few days ago. That one had more queries than just 'rectal exam' though.
It's because they're thin wrappers around Facebook's stream search, a feature we shipped in July of 2009. The actual search engine is Facebook's. These projects are just hitting an ajax endpoint with a query and dressing up the results.
Ironically, this is the very same feature that I prostrated myself over here when it was down for a few hours 8 days ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1333000). Which way do you want it, HN? :)
If I can preempt the inevitable flood of "How do you sleep at night???" variants: note that you can't really use this to target an individual user. There are 400 million people using Facebook. If you query something embarassing, you might see some titillating content go by, but that doesn't prove much of anything. Those same search terms typed into Twitter search, or for that matter Google, turn up a lot of material that I would not choose to share, but these people have apparently chosen to do so. If you really want to invade privacy, stream search would be a spectacularly stupid way to do it; any given result has a 1 in 400 million chance of being from who you're looking for.
Like Google, Twitter search, and every search box on every web site ever in the history of anything, this search feature is privacy-neutral: it only allows you to see what you were already allowed to see. Does the fact that Google'ing for "my rectal surgery" uncovers some over-sharing make Google, or the web, evil? Or is it at least possible that the good done by answering legitimate queries outweighs this apparent harm?
[+] [-] ihodes|16 years ago|reply
On the other hand, had I not just deleted my FB account, I would have been upset over this. Zuck's gang recklessly opens up whatever they see fit: it could easily and quite possibly be photos tomorrow and your wall the next day, and (as before: http://cl.ly/16wW) your "private" chats the day after that.
Irresponsible and disrespectful.
[+] [-] GeneralMaximus|16 years ago|reply
Your Facebook photos are not private at all. Anyone who has a URL to your photo can see it. In fact, anybody can access any file on FBCDN[1] as long as they have the URL to said file.
We share lots of Facebook pics on irc://irc.oftc.net:6667/#hackers-india. A lot of us don't have FB accounts, but those who do paste FBCDN URLs of interesting pics in the channel. Fun times :)
[1] FBCDN is Facebook's content distribution network
[+] [-] whalesalad|16 years ago|reply
I can't stand this FB bashing. Zucks gang recklessly opening up whatever they see fit? It's a FREE SERVICE!
[+] [-] flatline|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yosho|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jsz0|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JMiao|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Groxx|16 years ago|reply
It looks that way. Currently delete facebook account is one of the top searches on Google. [ http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=delete%20facebook%2... ]
No no no no no, that's not what those graphs show. They all hit 100%. It's growing extremely quickly, but the graph shows nothing more. By the same graphs + the flawed interpretation, in July 2008, "Batman robin" accounted for every Google search. Look! 100%! http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=Batman%20robin&...
Why do I see this continually misinterpreted? The "learn what these numbers mean" link is pretty darned clear, and it can easily be grokked by doing more than one search.
[+] [-] Groxx|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavs|16 years ago|reply
http://i.imgur.com/ZuDt1.png
http://i.imgur.com/U3xcm.png
[+] [-] ihodes|16 years ago|reply
Twitter users, unless they protect their tweets (in which case you're not searching though them: surprise!), know that everyone can see their tweets. Facebook users have "friended" the people they want to see their status updates.
Either you're genuinely confused, in which case I hope I've cleared things up, or you're using this as a red herring.
[+] [-] friendstock|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] param|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|16 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Jun8|16 years ago|reply
I also queried "I love my wife", "I love Shakespeare", "quaternions" and wound up wasting more than an hour on this site. It's fascinating and not all in a bad sense. In fact, we should have a Digg-like "best 100 best statuses of the day" site.
Point of the matter is: If you don't want your statuses to be public, adjust the settings. At this age and time arguing most users don't know how to do this or were somehow duped is appalling.
[+] [-] jacquesm|16 years ago|reply
Why? Most users really don't understand the consequences of the default settings, let alone which checkbox has which effect.
Just the other day I was browsing CNN and to great surprise a section on the site named a HN user as recommending that I should go and check out some link. Turned out it was powered by facebook and I had made the mistake of not logging out.
That's something that won't be happening again, but I'm not sure I could have predicted that sort of thing would happen.
And I'm definitely not comfortable with it.
For me, facebook has changed from a place where I share some stuff about me with my friends to a shingle for people to get in contact with me through other means.
I will not delete my account because that is a useful function, but my facebook days as an active user are mostly over (not that anybody cares or should care).
[+] [-] natep|16 years ago|reply
And before you say it, no, this didn't affect 'most' Facebook users, but these aren't the only ones leaving their privacy settings on default.
[+] [-] motters|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paul9290|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ErrantX|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dalore|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|16 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] aidenn0|16 years ago|reply
http://youropenbook.org/?q=hottie223&x=0&y=0&gen...
[edit] Nevermind, as I scrolled down, the profile pictures started repeating, guess it's just ordinary spam[/edit]
[+] [-] ErrantX|16 years ago|reply
My Facebook profile is "open" by default [1] ( particularly my status updates) but I can't get my statuses to show no matter what queries I try.
Has anyone been able to nail down:
- what exactly gets pushed into this feed
- what privacy settings remove you from or ad you to the feed
(kmavm, anything you can add in here?)
1. http://www.facebook.com/errantx
[+] [-] motters|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FabriceTalbot|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|16 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] philschwartz|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kmavm|16 years ago|reply
Ironically, this is the very same feature that I prostrated myself over here when it was down for a few hours 8 days ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1333000). Which way do you want it, HN? :)
If I can preempt the inevitable flood of "How do you sleep at night???" variants: note that you can't really use this to target an individual user. There are 400 million people using Facebook. If you query something embarassing, you might see some titillating content go by, but that doesn't prove much of anything. Those same search terms typed into Twitter search, or for that matter Google, turn up a lot of material that I would not choose to share, but these people have apparently chosen to do so. If you really want to invade privacy, stream search would be a spectacularly stupid way to do it; any given result has a 1 in 400 million chance of being from who you're looking for.
Like Google, Twitter search, and every search box on every web site ever in the history of anything, this search feature is privacy-neutral: it only allows you to see what you were already allowed to see. Does the fact that Google'ing for "my rectal surgery" uncovers some over-sharing make Google, or the web, evil? Or is it at least possible that the good done by answering legitimate queries outweighs this apparent harm?
[+] [-] DeusExMachina|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aresant|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aheilbut|16 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ihodes|16 years ago|reply
Please, this argument is getting old.
And if "people" didn't mind, this probably wouldn't be getting so much attention.