

Facebook Calls All Hands Meeting On Privacy - ssclafani
http://www.allfacebook.com/2010/05/facebook-calls-all-hands-meeting-on-privacy/

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bonaldi
Don't expect a reversal. This meeting will be because staff are seeing their
peers suddenly hating them on their favourite forums, and execs are seeing the
media having a pop. It's to reassure the troops, to tell them "we're right,
here's our strategy, the rest of the world are idiots, carry on".

Forget Google, these guys are the new Microsoft.

~~~
MikeCapone
Warning, I'm going to plug my personal blog:

> Forget Google, these guys are the new Microsoft.

I wrote something about this recently. I think the reason why Google and
Facebook are acting very differently can be explained in good part by the kind
of incentives that they face (they're very different):

[http://michaelgr.com/2010/02/15/why-google-is-not-like-
micro...](http://michaelgr.com/2010/02/15/why-google-is-not-like-microsoft-or-
facebook/)

~~~
ekanes
Instead of plugging your blog, why not put what you said here? It's your
content, just copy and paste and link to your blog at the bottom. (If you do a
good job, people will check you out.)

~~~
jemfinch
Are you really complaining because he used proper data normalization?

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Sam_Odio
This meeting isn't an all hands, it's an employee-driven open forum. It was
schduled because there has been interest around the public's recent reaction
to facebook's privacy decisions. I don't expect any announcemets to be made,
just a discussion to be had.

One lesson I learned from the internal response: Many Facebook engineers read
HN. Your opinions are being heard.

~~~
iamdave
But are they _listening_? Hearing me and listening to me aren't the same. Just
go look at all those groups "We want a dislike" button, obviously the _users_
want something and Facebook just sat back and went "Uh. No"

~~~
derefr
Listening to someone and deciding to agree with them aren't the same, either.
Parents listen to their children asking for unhealthy foods, and then deny it
to them. Facebook knew that a dislike button would hurt their userbase
sociologically just as much as any HFCS-laced soda would physiologically (it
would allow people a quick, automatable way to bully others, it was shown when
a closed test was attempted to be taken far out of proportion by the recipient
compared to the signaler's intent, etc.)

That's not to say that Facebook's current privacy attitude is "healthy" for
its users (and it's not to say that it's unhealthy, either); it's simply that
Facebook has to consider their userbase as a _society_ with _interactions_ ,
which can't be swayed by the aggregate opinion of self-interested individuals
who aren't thinking about how what they want will affect others.

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DrSprout
I suspect they didn't realize how many people, when faced with the mangling of
their profiles, replacing all of their interests with poorly and
inconsistently guessed 'likes,' would simply get rid of all that data.

It's really interesting looking at Facebook in Spanish, their localization
with these roll-outs is pretty slipshod. "Mark as read" showed up in English
for over a month after the big PHP-compiling to C++ shift, which otherwise was
pretty good.

Likewise, though my profile is written in English, Facebook took it upon
itself to guess what everything meant, and translate it into actual books and
such. The result was actually remarkably effective, but still imperfect, and
plain text is simply a better data model for what should be a simple "here's
who I am."

~~~
indigoviolet
You're wrong about too many people getting rid of their data. [I work at
Facebook]

~~~
dpritchett
[citation needed]

~~~
andreyf
Seriously? Aside from a minority fraction of the techies, do you really think
facebook users care about this?

~~~
evgen
Those small pebbles and chunks of ice sliding down the mountain could be
normal erosion or the first signs of an impending avalanche. Facebook is
firmly in the "evil" category for many outspoken techies (e.g. those people
every Facebook employee runs into at parties who no longer think they are
working for a cool company but who instead mention how they are now working
for Sauron) and even among the general populace the company is widely
considered to be bit creepy. If things continue the current trajectory I think
a serious backlash and government regulation is not out of the question.

~~~
ekanes
Fantastic point. We all want the respect of our peers. Even if this doesn't
affect FB's public status, their ability to attract great people will be
severely diminished.

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whyenot
It's probably too late. Not to regain user's trust, it doesn't appear most
users actually care about Facebook's privacy issues. No, I think it's too late
to avoid the creation and eventual passage of some "protect the children" laws
that at least a few politicians are almost certainly working on right now.

~~~
Silhouette
If I were an exec at Facebook, I wouldn't worry about laws, I'd worry about a
small project in some CompSci student's garage that is going to turn into an
open, fully encrypted, freely available, direct competitor within the next
year.

One potential rival service has been all over the geek news sites for the past
day or two after raising a significant level of funding via donations very
quickly. No doubt there are dozens more experiments out there that might turn
out to be the next big social network instead...

~~~
acgourley
It's an oversimplification to see facebook as one product that can be replaced
by another product. Facebook as it is now fulfills a lot of roles, some roles
are going to see competition, some roles like facebook connect are here to
stay.

~~~
Silhouette
I'm sure Facebook would _like_ to be some sort of all-emcompassing platform,
but its main value has always been the "self-updating address book", which is
useful if and only if almost everyone you know is on there. All the other
stuff, the messaging and photo sharing and toy apps and personal information
pages and so on, can already be done elsewhere as well or better than Facebook
does it, except for the automatic links to friends and the security/networking
that come with that. If Facebook either loses a significant number of people
in someone's friendship group to a rival system or loses the
privacy/networking effects by making almost everything public, its value is
going to drop very quickly for a lot of users and a vicious circle of people
leaving is likely to follow.

------
slapshot
[x] Mark Zuckerberg and 6 other friends are attending Privacy Meeting.

~~~
joubert
where's the unlike hyperlink?

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nfnaaron
"Facebook has come under increasing scrutiny for a number of reasons and many
were left with a sour taste in their mouth following a New York Times reader
Q&A with Elliot Schrage, the company’s Vice President for Public Policy."

Vice President for Public Policy.

What does "Public" mean? If I hide him from my friends, is he then invisible
to my friends but still "public" and accessible by facebook's partners and
affiliates?

I'm so confused.

~~~
qeorge
If anyone from FB is reading, its responses like this one (from the linked NYT
article) that are leaving the sour taste:

 _"Our extensive efforts to provide users greater control over what and how
they share appear to be too confusing for some of our more than 400 million
users."_

\- Elliot Schrage, VP public policy @ Facebook

What an asshole.

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nfnaaron
In the NYT Q&A linked from the article, VP Elliot Schrage gives a link to his
profile and Zuckerberg's.

Zuckerberg's is a good link. Schrage's is not found.

Bad link, or item three for tomorrow's meeting?

Edit: typo.

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nfnaaron
"... many privacy advocates want further changes involved with Facebook’s new
social plugins, as many of them function when a user isn’t logged in ..."

Wait, what? What plugins operate when I'm not logged in? What did I miss?

~~~
Raphael
I generally find the log out action to not actually work.

~~~
chronomex
Forget that, the "deactivate profile" function barely works.

I deactivated my profile last Monday. Out of habit, today I went to Facebook
from another computer that still had a session cookie. It reactivated my
account, no questions asked.

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pasbesoin
This is what US$50,000 (and rising) in donations buys you (for Diaspora).
(Hopefully, it will also buy an interesting and valuable project/product, in
the long run.)

Being about money, the Facebook executive suite takes notice when people start
putting significant (aggregate) coin towards their replacement. (My
statement's a bit facetious, but the level of participation -- and
contributions -- doubtless has contributed in finally convincing them this all
is more than just "some d-mned users b-tching".)

The thing is, we've had long enough, and enough distinct events and changes,
to see their true stripe. I hope people won't be lulled back into complacency
by any diversionary actions they may take nor by any placating language they
may issue. If they temporarily retreat, just remember Beacon.

