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.
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'd argue Gmail is a social network. Facebook just makes it a little easier to share images, videos, etc. I don't think it's a difference in kind but of degree. When I send an email to someone, I expect it to only go to that one person. Sure, there are some cases where it might be okay for the receipient to share it, and usually they have an understanding ahead of time of whether it's okay or not. But the sender usually considers it a violation of privacy if it is forwarded to third-parties, especially to the general public. If Google one day unilaterally decided to make all your Gmail email publicly viewable and searchable, there would be a shit storm. Yes, in theory before your emails could have been made public. But in practice, 99% of them do not and it would only have happened if the sender or receiver caused it to happen. But in this case, the trusted intermediary service caused it to happen. That's the violation. So I think the Gmail example is valid and relevant.
Well, Google seemed to disagree somewhat when they launched the maligned Buzz. Not that you don't make a good argument, but just to say that Gmail wasn't off-limits for a while.
I partly agree.
However, the problem is that the default of FB is to share everything to everybody and the average user isn't aware of that - if they knew, I don't think they'd be that comfortable with it.
The issue here is classically updates have been private. In most cases people are USED to the fact that their updates are private.
Many of them have no idea that suddenly their shit is public. I'll bet the old default search on this service of "Rectal Exam" which had painful details in many cases of people or their family with cancer, or this DUI search are examples of shit if people knew better would set private.
Unfortunately they most likely THINK they're still private. ( To be fair I'm more likely to think Rectal Exam would be something people would prefer private... the DUI people seem more like they might not care who knows).
Most users of services like Facebook can barely figure out how to login - they most certainly don't spend the amount of time the fine denizens of places like Hacker News do reading about the latest privacy changes and flaps. It's a disservice to expect (and I'm speaking from the standpoint of Facebook's "Let's randomly change settings" because they KNOW they're changing things and most people don't realize they've changed) the average Facebook user to realize that suddenly something which for years has been private (friends + family only) is suddenly public.
On one hand you have the aforementioned prior default search of this service (posted last week) which brings up embarrassing details about hemorrhoid surgeries and heartfelt updates about Grandma's rectal cancer. This is stuff that the simple reality is well, people have a right to expect they're posting a private update to friends and family. A few years prior this would be the kind of thing you'd send in an email blast, perhaps.
On the other hand you have the DUI stuff. In all reality the current glance at it is it's a lot of pucker faced young kids who probably genuinely don't care right now. I can't and won't assume they aren't proud of their current status as a drunk driver. But I guarantee in a few years when suddenly their careers take off (I'm being optimistic and hopeful on all of their behalves - so many of them look too young to even legally drink in the US) that this will become a problem.
Not every employer runs criminal background checks (Which most certainly would flag a DUI) and those are typically done in conjunction with / contingent with a job offer. But many employers these days are Googling the names of people who send them resumes. I can guarantee (again, being optimistic) that these people would NOT like to find out Googling their name brings up a proud brag about their DUI conviction.
TL;DR - I'm still half asleep, but what I'm saying is the issue is bait and switch. Hacker News readers know about every privacy change that is made at Facebook. My mom and sister though, for example, only know what historically has been true. They assume that their updates by default still go to family and friends. They filter their posting with that in mind. Your average user is NOT informed that their updates suddenly go public, and can be viewed by anyone.
edit - it seems it does a random search now. Previously it opened up "Rectal Surgery". This morning it defaulted to "DUI" for me. Hence my commentary above (assumed it was statically defaulting to DUI incorrectly now)
FWIW, the previous default was "Friends and Networks", not "Friends and Family". That includes Networks like the United Kingdom with 20M users and no restrictions on who could join.
> ... 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
I think you have to know certain things like the person's fb id, album id, photo id to construct the URL. Or you have to be able to view the photo on FB to get that URL. In either case, who ever distributes the URL already had access to the photo. So that's more about trusting your "friends" to keep what they see private than trusting Facebook.
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.
Honestly, what's getting old is a small, vocal, paranoid, patronizing minority blowing things way out of perspective while hundreds of millions of people go about their lives in the same world that not long ago had both water-coolers and telephone directories.
Honestly, I don't think it's that. When my parents ask me about Facebook privacy, it's a big deal. When the NYT and Newsweek run stories about it, it's getting mainstream. This is not just a vocal minority.
Fair enough. Can you say even 1 million Facebook users gives a crap?
The fact that Facebook really isn't reacting much to this outrage (albiet justified), farther solidifies the point that people who are vocal about it to the extend that they are ready to stop using Facebook is a very small minority and it will not effect them much, if at all. When you have 400 million users, do you really care losing 100k users who are most likely tech savvy and using Ad-blockers anyways?
No I can't say that. But neither can you with any certainty proclaim the opposite.
I admit that the particular use of "not just a vocal minority" wasn't accurate, if you interpret it to mean that the majority of Facebook users are concerned. You could also interpret my statement as "there are more people than just a vocal minority who are concerned." My point is that this is a pretty big deal, not just something that HN readers are up in arms about.
I don't believe NYT covers this because a lot of normal people, like your parents, are concerned. In fact I think the reverse is true, people read these FUD stories that media outlets are picking up and get overly concerned.
This is just a fad and, annoyingly, it will pass ( like the google hate we had a couple of months back).
I'd love to be wrong. But I doubt it.
Those launching sites like this are just jumping on the bandwagon and will jump off just as easily without actually doing anything.
Edit: by the way. Everyone non-techy that I try and talk about this with just shrugs and says "yeh I checked them, it's cool". Same as they have for the last 18 months. This hasn't raised it's profile - yet (still hopeful)
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?
when I type an email I have an expectation that only I and the recipient will see the email.
similarly, a vast majority of these people are not intending to broadcast these updates into the public space (non-anonymously with a photo of their face attached next to the update)
I personally don't have any moral outrage over this, but that is the issue. You've built up an expectation of privacy with people and then took it away without enough user messaging. One dialog if I remember correctly, saying something along the lines of "Share your updates with everyone." (what does "everyone" even mean?)
tldr: you switched the defaults on people and they haven't realized it.
Your argument would be a lot more plausible if Facebook didn't have a habit of resetting peoples privacy settings, and if those settings were clearly, easily and permanently settable.
As it stands, I can only presume your defensiveness and your obviously nonsensical comparisons to twitter (a system where everyone knows that everything is truly public) make me think you know, deep down, that your employer has made some bad decisions.
I'm curious: does facebook train their employees to identify themselves as employees then to rail angrily and arrogantly at people who have privacy concerns, or is that your own initiative? Either way I'm unsurprised by it. Facebook seems like the sort of place where such utterly unprofessional behavior would be the norm.
Facebook: unilaterally changing your privacy settings then berating you and making disingenuous comparisons when you get upset about it since 2004.
That said, HN isn't a place for trolling. I don't think anybody appreciates the way you're distorting people's concerns so that you can mock them.
You're smart enough to understand that the problem is not that 'public information is public', but rather that FB's habit of changing and hiding settings makes it hard to tell what is public. As such, your entire rant was not just off-topic, it was an insult to everyone with a valid concern, and every single member of the HN community who would be interested in a legitimate conversation.
So please... troll elsewhere. We don't need your kind here. This is supposed to be a place of discussion, not a place where angry FaceBook engineers insult FaceBook users with a barrage of irrelevant bullshit.
That's a little harsh. If facebook engineers won't come here to say stuff like this how are they going to get a different opinion. I say let them come and tell them what you think, but don't repay in kind.
The evidence being offered here (people writing public status updates with mildly titillating strings in them) has nothing to do with the claim that Facebook users don't understand Facebook privacy. In contexts where we all agree that the users understand the privacy model (twitter, plain ol' html), the same experiment produces the same results: people over-sharing.
If you wish to demonstrate the claim that Facebook users don't know what they're doing, this does nothing to convince those who do not already agree with you.
It takes over 100 clicks to make a FB profile completely private, and the settings aren't permanent. That's clearly a business decision. You don't need to be a UX expert to understand the aggregate effects.
I can't even fathom how anybody could look at such a system and claim that the users all understand the ramifications with a straight face.
It's really insulting that you're trying to sell such an utterly asinine claim by pointing out that people sometimes overshare on twitter, in blog comments, and in line at Starbucks. The FB privacy system is broken by design.
Search just happens to offer an amusing window into content that is, in all likelihood, x% people who would overshare anyway, and 100-x% people who thought they were just talking to their friends, or friends + FoF, where x is nearly guaranteed not to be 0 or 100.
You're asserting what you seek to prove: that some large fraction, perhaps a majority, of Facebook users do not understand who can see their status updates. It is absolutely true, of course, that some users do not understand who can see their status updates; the law of large numbers assures us of that. So, we actually agree on the fundamentals of the situation: some users don't understand who can see their status updates. The question is, how many? What is your actual guess? 0.1%? 1%, 10%, 50%? What percentage would be acceptable, given that 0% is not achievable no matter what?
There are some complex corners of FB's privacy system; e.g., some of the ins and outs with photos are pretty subtle. However, status updates are one of the more clear areas: Q: Who can see this? A: Everyone.
Finally, with respect to the "trolling" charge, I am only human. Those HN readers who are also Facebook users, thanks for putting food on my family's table, and I'm truly sorry, and professionally humbled, if our product has let you down. However, this is not a Facebook customer support forum; it is a community of technologists, and it would be condescending not to speak to HN as if I'm speaking to my peers. I think the silence of my fellow Facebook engineers on threads like this one, while showing admirable restraint, has left the bogus impression that we do not talk, think, or care about the implications of the products we build. We do, and a searching, frank dialog with our more technically minded users, which will necessarily include argument, can help us figure out how to make things better.
Very well put with respect to trolling. I, for one, appreciate the public dialogue. One nitpick: the law of large numbers doesn't mean what you intended here.
I hope the intention was clear: with 400 million users, it is a certainty that a feature will be incomprehensible, unusable, etc., to some non-zero number of users.
I'm now wondering what the rigorous way to describe the phenomenon you describe is. Something like, as the number of realizations of a random variable increases, the probability of seeing a realization below a given threshold approaches one. This sounds a lot like some of the theory related to hypothesis testing but it's been too long.
So please... troll elsewhere. We don't need your kind here. This is supposed to be a place of discussion
I, personally, would like to hear both sides' arguments. So, please exclude myself from your version of 'we'.
Also, how's it supposed to be a place of discussion, if we have 100 people here saying 'FB is bad, very bad', and 0 people saying 'it's not as bad as it seems'. Doesn't sound like a productive discussion to me.
Oh come on. If you think that was trolling, you don't know what trolling is. He was civil and presented a cogent argument. The fact that you disagree with him does not give you the right to lob ad hominems.
He mocked a legitimate user concern (FB privacy confusion) with his "How do you sleep at night???" comments, in which he portrayed anybody with this concern as hysterical and irrational.
Search doesn't cause the problem (it merely exposes and exacerbates it), but it's a legitimate problem. And it's ridiculous for a FB employee to go around mocking those of us who had to talk our parents through a more than 100 click privacy-restoration process over the phone. (Especially when our parents are over 70, and not the fastest clickers in the West.)
If he wants to mock people for holding that concern, he's a troll, plain and simple.
And if you think that mocking people by putting imagined hyperbolic rhetoric in their mouth is civil and cogent, well... I suppose we have different definitions of civil and cogent.
----
edit: p.s. calling somebody a name is not an ad hominem, it's an insult. Here's a helpful example:
ad hominem: mos1 is wrong because he's an asshole.
To be honest here; while kmavm has been showing "bias" by virtue of being a Facebooker he's presenting a reasonably valid view.. you are the one that appears to be on the verge of trolling/abusing (I realise that might not be intentional - so here's a heads up of how it looks).
I for one want to hear from kmavm - he has raised some clear points.
All in all... why don't we leave the sniping to one side.
I've only seen one legitimate point from him: that search isn't the root cause of the privacy problem.
Unfortunately instead of then admitting that it does exacerbate the issue, he then pretends that there is no issue, asserts that all FB users fully understand FB's privacy model and insults anybody who doesn't agree.
Something to think about: can you imagine a Zappo's employee arguing with concerned customers the way kmavm has?
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.
Either you're genuinely confused, in which case I hope I've cleared things up, or you're using this as a red herring.
>Not a big user of either twitter or facebook, But I am trying to understand this.
You know there are people out there who are actually foreign to how Facebook works because either they don't use it or find it silly. I am not trying to defend facebook or twitter. I actually find the whole idea of following around people's mundane activity utterly stupid. ~400 million people obviously thinks otherwise.
You are assuming people don't know that they're sharing with more than just their friends. You don't have any data to back this up. There is, however, evidence to the contrary. 35% of users adjusted their settings when presented with the privacy transition dialog back in December, and that's not including the people who had modified their privacy settings in the past, which made them not default to "Everyone".
Some of these people in the search results know they're sharing with everyone. Some don't. The mere presence of people who don't understand their privacy settings doesn't suggest that a large portion of the Facebook userbase shares that confusion.
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).
CNN doesn't get any of your Facebook data. It's an iframe hosted on Facebook. That HN user wants people to know that he likes that article.
(Your reaction is partially justified due to the existence of Instant Personalization on Yelp, Pandora, and Docs, which does share information without your consent.)
An iframe is an implementation detail, when I'm wearing my 'user' hat I see stuff on CNN that shouldn't be there. Whether it is technically hosted elsewhere is of interest but to a user it probably does not matter much.
True, CNN doesn't get your Facebook data directly, but if FB automatically creates a connection and CNN gets added to your interest then, if i have understood correctly, that network can see at least basic info about you.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
86 comments
[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 133 ms ] threadOn 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.
I can't stand this FB bashing. Zucks gang recklessly opening up whatever they see fit? It's a FREE SERVICE!
Problem is, I don't know 'the public'.
Many of them have no idea that suddenly their shit is public. I'll bet the old default search on this service of "Rectal Exam" which had painful details in many cases of people or their family with cancer, or this DUI search are examples of shit if people knew better would set private.
Unfortunately they most likely THINK they're still private. ( To be fair I'm more likely to think Rectal Exam would be something people would prefer private... the DUI people seem more like they might not care who knows).
Most users of services like Facebook can barely figure out how to login - they most certainly don't spend the amount of time the fine denizens of places like Hacker News do reading about the latest privacy changes and flaps. It's a disservice to expect (and I'm speaking from the standpoint of Facebook's "Let's randomly change settings" because they KNOW they're changing things and most people don't realize they've changed) the average Facebook user to realize that suddenly something which for years has been private (friends + family only) is suddenly public.
On one hand you have the aforementioned prior default search of this service (posted last week) which brings up embarrassing details about hemorrhoid surgeries and heartfelt updates about Grandma's rectal cancer. This is stuff that the simple reality is well, people have a right to expect they're posting a private update to friends and family. A few years prior this would be the kind of thing you'd send in an email blast, perhaps.
On the other hand you have the DUI stuff. In all reality the current glance at it is it's a lot of pucker faced young kids who probably genuinely don't care right now. I can't and won't assume they aren't proud of their current status as a drunk driver. But I guarantee in a few years when suddenly their careers take off (I'm being optimistic and hopeful on all of their behalves - so many of them look too young to even legally drink in the US) that this will become a problem.
Not every employer runs criminal background checks (Which most certainly would flag a DUI) and those are typically done in conjunction with / contingent with a job offer. But many employers these days are Googling the names of people who send them resumes. I can guarantee (again, being optimistic) that these people would NOT like to find out Googling their name brings up a proud brag about their DUI conviction.
TL;DR - I'm still half asleep, but what I'm saying is the issue is bait and switch. Hacker News readers know about every privacy change that is made at Facebook. My mom and sister though, for example, only know what historically has been true. They assume that their updates by default still go to family and friends. They filter their posting with that in mind. Your average user is NOT informed that their updates suddenly go public, and can be viewed by anyone.
edit - it seems it does a random search now. Previously it opened up "Rectal Surgery". This morning it defaulted to "DUI" for me. Hence my commentary above (assumed it was statically defaulting to DUI incorrectly now)
Still of course a world of difference from "publicly searchable".
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
It's sometimes even possible to turn knowing a random FB Photo URL into viewing a whole (or part of) an Album.
After all, when someone else is permitted to upload photos of you to the internet, all bets are off.
If you couldn't share the URLs on your IRC channel then you could just copy the photos and post them to an image sharing website.
Please, this argument is getting old.
And if "people" didn't mind, this probably wouldn't be getting so much attention.
The fact that Facebook really isn't reacting much to this outrage (albiet justified), farther solidifies the point that people who are vocal about it to the extend that they are ready to stop using Facebook is a very small minority and it will not effect them much, if at all. When you have 400 million users, do you really care losing 100k users who are most likely tech savvy and using Ad-blockers anyways?
I admit that the particular use of "not just a vocal minority" wasn't accurate, if you interpret it to mean that the majority of Facebook users are concerned. You could also interpret my statement as "there are more people than just a vocal minority who are concerned." My point is that this is a pretty big deal, not just something that HN readers are up in arms about.
This is just a fad and, annoyingly, it will pass ( like the google hate we had a couple of months back).
I'd love to be wrong. But I doubt it.
Those launching sites like this are just jumping on the bandwagon and will jump off just as easily without actually doing anything.
Edit: by the way. Everyone non-techy that I try and talk about this with just shrugs and says "yeh I checked them, it's cool". Same as they have for the last 18 months. This hasn't raised it's profile - yet (still hopeful)
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?
For sure the latter.
We should make a tutorial on online privacy management though.
when I type an email I have an expectation that only I and the recipient will see the email.
similarly, a vast majority of these people are not intending to broadcast these updates into the public space (non-anonymously with a photo of their face attached next to the update)
I personally don't have any moral outrage over this, but that is the issue. You've built up an expectation of privacy with people and then took it away without enough user messaging. One dialog if I remember correctly, saying something along the lines of "Share your updates with everyone." (what does "everyone" even mean?)
tldr: you switched the defaults on people and they haven't realized it.
[citation needed]
As it stands, I can only presume your defensiveness and your obviously nonsensical comparisons to twitter (a system where everyone knows that everything is truly public) make me think you know, deep down, that your employer has made some bad decisions.
I'm curious: does facebook train their employees to identify themselves as employees then to rail angrily and arrogantly at people who have privacy concerns, or is that your own initiative? Either way I'm unsurprised by it. Facebook seems like the sort of place where such utterly unprofessional behavior would be the norm.
Facebook: unilaterally changing your privacy settings then berating you and making disingenuous comparisons when you get upset about it since 2004.
Clearly not.
That said, HN isn't a place for trolling. I don't think anybody appreciates the way you're distorting people's concerns so that you can mock them.
You're smart enough to understand that the problem is not that 'public information is public', but rather that FB's habit of changing and hiding settings makes it hard to tell what is public. As such, your entire rant was not just off-topic, it was an insult to everyone with a valid concern, and every single member of the HN community who would be interested in a legitimate conversation.
So please... troll elsewhere. We don't need your kind here. This is supposed to be a place of discussion, not a place where angry FaceBook engineers insult FaceBook users with a barrage of irrelevant bullshit.
The evidence being offered here (people writing public status updates with mildly titillating strings in them) has nothing to do with the claim that Facebook users don't understand Facebook privacy. In contexts where we all agree that the users understand the privacy model (twitter, plain ol' html), the same experiment produces the same results: people over-sharing.
If you wish to demonstrate the claim that Facebook users don't know what they're doing, this does nothing to convince those who do not already agree with you.
I can't even fathom how anybody could look at such a system and claim that the users all understand the ramifications with a straight face.
It's really insulting that you're trying to sell such an utterly asinine claim by pointing out that people sometimes overshare on twitter, in blog comments, and in line at Starbucks. The FB privacy system is broken by design.
Search just happens to offer an amusing window into content that is, in all likelihood, x% people who would overshare anyway, and 100-x% people who thought they were just talking to their friends, or friends + FoF, where x is nearly guaranteed not to be 0 or 100.
There are some complex corners of FB's privacy system; e.g., some of the ins and outs with photos are pretty subtle. However, status updates are one of the more clear areas: Q: Who can see this? A: Everyone.
Finally, with respect to the "trolling" charge, I am only human. Those HN readers who are also Facebook users, thanks for putting food on my family's table, and I'm truly sorry, and professionally humbled, if our product has let you down. However, this is not a Facebook customer support forum; it is a community of technologists, and it would be condescending not to speak to HN as if I'm speaking to my peers. I think the silence of my fellow Facebook engineers on threads like this one, while showing admirable restraint, has left the bogus impression that we do not talk, think, or care about the implications of the products we build. We do, and a searching, frank dialog with our more technically minded users, which will necessarily include argument, can help us figure out how to make things better.
I hope the intention was clear: with 400 million users, it is a certainty that a feature will be incomprehensible, unusable, etc., to some non-zero number of users.
I'm now wondering what the rigorous way to describe the phenomenon you describe is. Something like, as the number of realizations of a random variable increases, the probability of seeing a realization below a given threshold approaches one. This sounds a lot like some of the theory related to hypothesis testing but it's been too long.
I, personally, would like to hear both sides' arguments. So, please exclude myself from your version of 'we'.
Also, how's it supposed to be a place of discussion, if we have 100 people here saying 'FB is bad, very bad', and 0 people saying 'it's not as bad as it seems'. Doesn't sound like a productive discussion to me.
He mocked a legitimate user concern (FB privacy confusion) with his "How do you sleep at night???" comments, in which he portrayed anybody with this concern as hysterical and irrational.
Search doesn't cause the problem (it merely exposes and exacerbates it), but it's a legitimate problem. And it's ridiculous for a FB employee to go around mocking those of us who had to talk our parents through a more than 100 click privacy-restoration process over the phone. (Especially when our parents are over 70, and not the fastest clickers in the West.)
If he wants to mock people for holding that concern, he's a troll, plain and simple.
And if you think that mocking people by putting imagined hyperbolic rhetoric in their mouth is civil and cogent, well... I suppose we have different definitions of civil and cogent.
----
edit: p.s. calling somebody a name is not an ad hominem, it's an insult. Here's a helpful example:
ad hominem: mos1 is wrong because he's an asshole.
insult: mos1 is both wrong and an asshole.
I for one want to hear from kmavm - he has raised some clear points.
All in all... why don't we leave the sniping to one side.
Unfortunately instead of then admitting that it does exacerbate the issue, he then pretends that there is no issue, asserts that all FB users fully understand FB's privacy model and insults anybody who doesn't agree.
Something to think about: can you imagine a Zappo's employee arguing with concerned customers the way kmavm has?
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]
http://i.imgur.com/ZuDt1.png
http://i.imgur.com/U3xcm.png
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.
>Not a big user of either twitter or facebook, But I am trying to understand this.
You know there are people out there who are actually foreign to how Facebook works because either they don't use it or find it silly. I am not trying to defend facebook or twitter. I actually find the whole idea of following around people's mundane activity utterly stupid. ~400 million people obviously thinks otherwise.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_brags_35_adjus...
Some of these people in the search results know they're sharing with everyone. Some don't. The mere presence of people who don't understand their privacy settings doesn't suggest that a large portion of the Facebook userbase shares that confusion.
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.
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).
(Your reaction is partially justified due to the existence of Instant Personalization on Yelp, Pandora, and Docs, which does share information without your consent.)
I wonder how normal people respond when they see that.
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.
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
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.