

Openbook - jgv
http://youropenbook.org/

======
ihodes
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.

Irresponsible and disrespectful.

~~~
whalesalad
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!

~~~
david927
Gmail is a free service. They had better not open up my emails to the public.

~~~
jrnkntl
But it's not a social network. Please don't take only one bit out an argument,
ignore the other ones, and use that to justify yours.

~~~
mkramlich
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.

------
jsz0
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.

~~~
JMiao
"paternity test" is a good start.

------
Groxx
_Are people really deleting their Facebook accounts?

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...](http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=delete%20facebook%20account&cmpt=q)
]_

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&...](http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=Batman%20robin&cmpt=q)

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
reply due to not being able to edit: fixed!

------
pavs
Not a big user of either twitter or facebook, But I am trying to understand
this. How are these two examples different?

<http://i.imgur.com/ZuDt1.png>

<http://i.imgur.com/U3xcm.png>

~~~
ihodes
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.

~~~
natrius
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".

[http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_brags_35_adjus...](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_brags_35_adjusted_their_privacy_settings.php)

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.

------
param
awesome! Fastest/Cheapest way to teach laypeople about Facebook privacy
issues.

------
Jun8
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.

~~~
jacquesm
> 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).

~~~
natrius
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.)

~~~
mrvir
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.

~~~
natrius
That was a bug that I believe has been fixed. Connections should never be made
automatically.

------
paul9290
Just don't write this stuff on the web and have your identity attached to it.
It's asinine.

------
ErrantX
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.

------
dalore
Search for horny, limit results to girls (or guys depending on pref). Win!

------
ErrantX
Hmm, this is interesting.

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>

------
aidenn0
So what's up with all the links to hottie223? Did people get hacked, or paid
to post the links or something?

[http://youropenbook.org/?q=hottie223&x=0&y=0&gen...](http://youropenbook.org/?q=hottie223&x=0&y=0&gender=any)

[edit] Nevermind, as I scrolled down, the profile pictures started repeating,
guess it's just ordinary spam[/edit]

------
motters
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.

------
FabriceTalbot
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.

------
philschwartz
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.

------
jacquesm
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.

~~~
kmavm
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?

~~~
ashot
sorry not the same.

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.

~~~
natrius
> _a vast majority of these people are not intending to broadcast these
> updates into the public space_

[citation needed]

------
DeusExMachina
Did you try the other searches? I'm literally astounded to see what people
write on Facebook. I would never write those things on a public place.

------
aresant
Nice UI element on the search by male / female.

------
aheilbut
If people don't mind friends and people they actually know reading such
updates, why would they care about strangers?

~~~
ihodes
Because friends and family aren't your boss you're bitching about on Facebook.

Please, this argument is getting old.

And if "people" didn't mind, this probably wouldn't be getting so much
attention.

~~~
aheilbut
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.

~~~
stanleydrew
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.

~~~
pavs
Is it fair to say that 200+million Facebook users are vocally concerned about
Facebook security? I seriously doubt that.

~~~
stanleydrew
That's taking it a bit too literally don't you think?

~~~
pavs
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?

~~~
stanleydrew
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.

