

Please update your Facebook privacy settings - fuelfive
http://frog.posterous.com/17787829

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thechangelog
No doubt.

I've been very careful to ensure that my FB profile is as locked-down as
possible, yet last night when I was uploading the latest round of baby photos
I caught, out of the corner of my eye, that the album was public by default.

If a technically-inclined person like me can find this difficult, what chance
does the general public have?

~~~
ryanjmo
If you really want your FB profile to be private, you should remove it from
Facebook. I don't know if you have noticed by now but Facebook is essentially
an open platform. Get the clue, remove anything you want to be be private from
Facebook and stop complaining.

~~~
thechangelog
When I signed up with FB there was a reasonable level of privacy. Sure, I was
posting my photos to some startup/corporation's servers, but that was an
acceptable trade off to me for the convenience of sharing baby pics with my
friends and family.

Since then their privacy settings have become convoluted (as expressed by the
OP). Meanwhile I have uploaded countless photos, made comments, etc... and
become quite invested in their ecosystem.

(FWIW, I'm a web developer. I can create my own photo sharing site for my
friends and family. FB is just really, really good at doing that stuff. Part
of my disappointment is mourning the erosion of an otherwise excellent web
app.)

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pak
...Arctan? Haha, what the hell is that?

This does well to illustrate what a fiendishly difficult thing it is for a
typical Facebook user to maintain privacy settings, and how difficult it must
be for Facebook to actually adhere to this rigamarole in every view, API,
feed, et al. presented by their site. (And they do screw that up from time to
time.)

Part of the reason I think they want to "simplify" privacy by making more
stuff open is because it is such a royal pain to implement. Compared to
Twitter, the logic that must go into every database query to determine
viewability of friends or comments or pictures must be ridiculously complex.
The current ability to group friends into lists is roughly equivalent to
implementing ACLs on groups, which is just as much fun for the user to set up
and maintain as it is for a programming team to get working (not fun at all).

~~~
psyklic
If they really wanted to simplify privacy, they would have simplified it.
Making some "Privacy Level" presets then allowing tweaks for advanced users is
not that difficult.

------
alttab
What is truly missing is: "Opt me out of all open graph APIs - make me
invisible"

~~~
ryanjmo
Yes, you can easily do this. All you have to do is erase your Facebook
profile. If you need help doing this, let me know.

~~~
alttab
It just ruffles my feathers a bit that Facebook says "come on in, connect with
your friends, keep in touch" and then after everyone is comfortable and gets
used to it, 5 years later says "and now all of you and your friends private
relationship and correspondence is public to anyone who wants it. And you have
no control over it."

I want an application that allows me to keep in touch with my long distance
friends easily, as I've moved around the country. Is it so much to ask that
I'm not manipulated and exploited in the process?

------
char
Seriously? This is not even remotely what adjusting Facebook privacy settings
is like.

At the risk of being down-voted due to lack of agreement, Facebook is an opt-
in service. They are making their priorities and privacy changes abundantly
clear.

Concerned? Opt-out of using Facebook.

~~~
ryanjmo
Every time I see a comment on hacker news that is sympathetic to Facebook's
privacy policies it gets down voted.

I don't get it; do the monitors of HN not think the users of hacker news are
intelligent enough to decide if Facebook's privacy policies are
positive/negative on their own?

Or to put in another way... Why do pro-Facebook privacy policy comments
continually get down voted?

~~~
psyklic
Up-vote = "I agree" OR "This is a valuable comment"

Down-vote = "I disagree" OR "This is not a valuable comment"

I would guess that most people disagree with pro-FB privacy policy statements.

~~~
ryanjmo
I find this funny because Facebook is an opt-in service. Why are people so
against the policies people are choosing to be a part of?

~~~
WarDekar
Because Facebook is pulling a bait and switch.

The vast majority of users (debatably all, outside of the ones that signed up
since this went into effect) signed up for Facebook under the pretenses they
had control over their privacy. To varying degrees depending on when they
signed up, of course- for instance when I signed up it was (in theory) only
shown to users at my school, and I had the option to only allow friends (which
of course I have control over).

I agree- for the people signing up from this point forward, they're opting
into it and should educate themselves enough to know what they're opting in to
(though I would argue they get duped anyway, but such is life and was, for
instance, MySpace before). But what about all the current users, that aren't
even going to realize that all their data is no longer private and they no
longer have control over it?

------
ohashi
Sadly, I was hoping to find some secret setting to I didn't know I should have
turned on/off.

------
tstegart
Goodness. Today I was surfing CNN.com and it had my friend's updates embedded
into the sidebar. I was like, WTF? Seriously Facebook?

