> 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.
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.
Institutions put out messages and public relations at odds with their own interests all the time. It's never very strongly at odds with the institutional interest of course. Just a sop put forward which gets back as much in extra public credulity as much as it costs in development, in opportunity cost to the raw, core profit machine, and in the seemingly cross-purposed promotion.
In this case, one is better off presuming that Marky Mark "My Users Are Dumb Fucks" Zucker-Borg's company does indeed consider privacy a thing extinct and is happier if the public thinks of it that way too, until we start to see an overwhelming trend in the other direction. Until then, the trend is clearly that Facebook wants to cultivate the "privacy + dinosaur = go together" association in the public's mind, and they even callowly do it right alongside a pseudo "we CARE that you should be able to protect your privacy".
The "caring" is simply out of a wish to create a legally plausible image of taking reasonable steps to give dumbfucks the opportunity to not have their privacy butchered wholesale, so that they can butcher privacy wholesale.
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.
> 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.
14 comments
[ 249 ms ] story [ 488 ms ] thread> 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.
Institutions put out messages and public relations at odds with their own interests all the time. It's never very strongly at odds with the institutional interest of course. Just a sop put forward which gets back as much in extra public credulity as much as it costs in development, in opportunity cost to the raw, core profit machine, and in the seemingly cross-purposed promotion.
In this case, one is better off presuming that Marky Mark "My Users Are Dumb Fucks" Zucker-Borg's company does indeed consider privacy a thing extinct and is happier if the public thinks of it that way too, until we start to see an overwhelming trend in the other direction. Until then, the trend is clearly that Facebook wants to cultivate the "privacy + dinosaur = go together" association in the public's mind, and they even callowly do it right alongside a pseudo "we CARE that you should be able to protect your privacy".
The "caring" is simply out of a wish to create a legally plausible image of taking reasonable steps to give dumbfucks the opportunity to not have their privacy butchered wholesale, so that they can butcher privacy wholesale.
Bonus 1: > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wofs8ZpcXlM&t=78s > Subliminal Messages Caught Red-Handed
Bonus 2: > http://blogs.computerworld.com/privacy/20698/privacy-postmor... > "Privacy: A Post-Mortem" by Steven Rambam. (Search for it on YouTube as well if desired.)
(For a minute I thought it was a Firefox dinosaur, in which case the derivation would have been far more obvious.)
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.