
Facebook's New Policies Make Harassment Easy - aj
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebooks_new_policies_make_harrassment_easy.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29
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carburator
I live in Tunisia and I'm ... pretty unorthodox. That's why I keep my profile
page as private as possible. I really hate those fanatics.

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izendejas
Just as Facebook can be an important vehicle for positive change, they are,
like most technologies/services, a double-edged sword. One can argue that
Facebook is just contributing to further awareness that such harassment takes
place. But in reality this draws attention away from such issues because the
central theme then becomes "Facebook is evil... Facebook makes it easier to
harass", etc. Such conclusions are unfair--these things will happen with or
without Facebook. That is, the key take-away from this article is that they're
making themselves a bigger target with their senseless privacy policies and
their unreasonable comments about privacy.

They're playing with fire and they _will_ get burned.

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indigoviolet
[Disclaimer: I work for Facebook, but obviously I don't speak for it].

It is unclear to me which "new" policies they are referring to in this
article: (a) Pages you fanned have always been public. (b) The "Religious
Views" and "Political Views" fields on your profile were not included in the
conversion to Page connections, explicitly to avoid this sort of thing. (c)
I'm also not sure how they decided that profiles were being _automatically_
deactivated based on reports. (d) The article doesn't really clarify how these
"targets" are being identified -- that seems somewhat important to decide
whether Facebook's "new" policies are making harassment easy...

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pasbesoin
Do you really not understand it?

You've created publicly accessible aggregations of members expressing interest
in a potentially limitless set of categories (whatever you may choose to call
them). You've taken previously private profile information and pre-emptively
linked it to these public categories. Even where some of this information was
previously publicly visible, it wasn't so conveniently publicly indexed;
someone would have to visit individual profiles in order to turn it up.

By the way, religious and political views do not only express themselves in
the fields you mention. What disrespectful soul there decided to take my
"Favorite Quotes", with access previously restricted to "Only Friends", and
plaster them -- without so much as a warning -- all over my public profile?

I've been pretty cautious, and there was nothing very incendiary or damaging
in them, but it still caught me out.

For me, it was the last straw. I hope FB, or at least its current Management
and, ahem, "policies", follows MySpace into a death spiral, taking their
accumulated financial equity with them before they have a chance to cash out.

I hope HN will pardon a bit of unusual vehemence from me, but Facebook has
come to be, simply stated, slimy. I guess I write this comment in the vague
hope some fraction of the message might get through whatever reality
distortion field they're currently running in-house.

Finally, as a few commentors have started to point out, as Facebook continues
to publicize their members' data, those members more and more tightly control
their expression. The result is that the site continues to become blander and
blander, less and less "personal". There's only so long people will continue
to find novelty and interest in generic updates.

Control over privacy. Personal expression. What brand-building feature are you
going to kill off, next?

I remember when "everyone" was on AIM. Even if you preferred another platform,
you used AIM because that's where the bulk of the general (U.S.) population
was, for IM; they'd "won" the IM platform war. I don't think I've even signed
on to the thing in a year or more.

A lesson for any "winner".

P.S. As for fanning being public, it used to be someone would have to seek
your ID out on those different fan pages. Then, around the end of the year,
Facebook decided to (pre-emptively, again) display that information in
aggregate for each user on their public profile. Maybe googling might have
exposed some or all of it previously, but you sure made it a lot more
convenient. (E.g. for that HR staffer looking for a quick means to winnow a
stack of resumes.) And I'm not even addressing the publication of everyone's
friends, etc.

If you've read this far, thanks for taking the time to consider my response.
It's not meant to be personal. (Well, except against those setting these
policies at Facebook. Even then, it's the policies that elicit the response;
the people I don't know personally.) It's strongly phrased to emphasize the
points, and the frustration they cause.

~~~
indigoviolet
" Even where some of this information was previously publicly visible, it
wasn't so conveniently publicly indexed; someone would have to visit
individual profiles in order to turn it up."

Previously, the text in these boxes was a link to a search result for users
who mentioned this text. Now it is a link to a Page where a small, random set
of the users who mentioned the text are displayed. You can still control the
visibility of these links on your profile. You'd still have to either visit a
lot of users' profiles (and they'd have to have set their interests to be
visible), or you'd have to reload a Page a lot of times.

(As for "Favorite Quotes", I will look into what is going on with it).

Thank you for your detailed feedback, btw.

~~~
nfnaaron
"You can still control the visibility of these links on your profile."

Is the following definition of "visibility" accurate in your context?

[http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/handy-facebook-
english-...](http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/handy-facebook-english-
translator#visibility)

"As Facebook explains, "Keep in mind that Facebook Pages you connect to are
public. You can control which friends are able to see connections listed on
your profile, but you may still show up on Pages you're connected to."
Likewise, "While you do have the option to hide your Friend List from being
visible on your profile, it will be available to applications you use and
websites you connect with using Facebook." Because Facebook deems this
information "public," it reserves the right to share that information with its
business partners and third party websites, regardless of your visibility
settings. "

    
    
      "regardless of your visibility settings."
    

So, we can "hides these links on your profile" from our friends, but we can't
hide them from Facebook's "business partners and third party websites,
regardless of your visibility settings?"

Isn't that completely backwards from what people would want from a social
site? If my understanding of this issue is correct (and I confess, I haven't
been able to hold FB's privacy policy and settings regime in my head for some
time), then this would be like hiding my street address from my friends but
broadcasting my address to junk mail companies with a hearty "Catalogs? Send
'em here!"

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gojomo
Someday, someone will be killed by a crazy person who takes advantage of an
online service's lax privacy controls. That will prompt legal changes like
those that followed the 1989 death of actress Rebecca Schaeffer at the hands
of a stalker. He used California DMV records to find her home address:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca_Schaeffer>

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calcnerd256
It's time for distributed trust.

