

Are We Really Dumb Zucks? - greatjackie
http://tweetagewasteland.com/2010/05/are-we-really-dumb-zucks/

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j_baker
The author is presuming that the IMs that an anonymous person on the internet
claims they have access to are real. The article that this came from won't
even state _where_ they came from. Was it the person in the chat themselves?
Was it someone who "discovered" Zuck's hard drive?

[http://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-
ims...](http://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-ims-wont-
help-facebooks-privacy-problems-2010-5)

~~~
Jun8
I can't believe how many people subscribe to the "guilty is as guilty does"
mantra. Because FB tried to profit to forcefully from user data these
adolescent comments _has_ to be Zuck's. Or he has to be a sociopath, or worse.

Assuming these IMs indeed are his, I find it amusing how people who complain
about FB making their info public have _no_ qualms about totally jumping on
private comments made by another.

~~~
cromulent
I don't complain about FB making my info public, as I have never chosen to
share any with them. However, I've been told on this site more than once that
over-30's "don't get" Facebook and should ask young people to explain it to
them, and should refrain from even making comments about FB.

So I find it a little amusing that one of the reasons I may not get it is
because I am not a "dumb fuck". Regardless of the comment's provenance, I
smiled when I heard it.

~~~
Jun8
Speaking of the "under 30" cool crowd behaving in "dumb fuck"-y ways, check
out Formspring. Endless hours of morbid entertainment.

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scurryjimjoe
FWIW, facebook actually responded to this article. They did not suggest that
the IM conversation was fake. Only that it was unrelated to the goals of the
company and their commitment to privacy.

~~~
wallywalrus
Nor did they suggest it was real.

~~~
pierrefar
If it weren't real, they would be denying it like very strongly, almost as if
their future depended on it.

~~~
cynicalkane
If Obama weren't born in Kenya, he would be denying it very strongly, almost
as if his future depended on it.

No, wait, things do not work that way.

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kilps
I keep hearing this 'don't post it if you'd never want it public' mantra; but
surely there should be a way for us to post thoughts/content to friends with
an expectation that only they will ever be able to see it?

The need to trust the person on the other side will always be there (people
have always been able to pass on letters and repeat conversations) - but that
doesn't change Facebook's role.

~~~
ghshephard
The very first of Email Policy that our General Counsel communicated to us:

"Only put in email what you are prepared to see in the front page of the New
York Times"

You may suggest that was an overblown policy, but in 1997, Eric Bradley (who
worked about 3' away from me in Building 4 on Middlefield) sent an Email to _a
lawyer_ at Netscape - venting about how much "I really do hate that company "
when Lawrence Lessig had asked about his application preferences being
switched over to IE.

His email (and venting) appeared soon thereafter in the New York Times.

Around here - if you have even the _slightest_ doubt about whether something
should appear on the front page of the NYT you either:

o Communicate in person, audibly. o Print it out and hand deliver/email/fax
(with the expectation that it will be shredded)

~~~
bitdiddle
This last suggestion is illegal. Lawyers generally counsel to not say much in
email because email is subject to discovery in legal proceedings. Many laws
also require retention policies that are subject to audit, which makes
shredding problematic.

~~~
ghshephard
You clearly don't work in Silicon Valley. Every building has dozens of Garbage
Cans marked "Shred" - The default for anything on your desk is to toss it into
one of those.

Nobody (except for HR, Finance and legal) keeps paper files anymore, so if you
don't want a permanent record - just deliver it on paper and it will
disappear. I've been through several discovery procedures, and all that
anybody has ever been interested in was email. Nobody even _thought_ to ask
for paper files.

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mkramlich
While I don't like the direction Facebook has been going in regarding privacy,
I am one of the folks of the position that it is not wise to put stuff on the
Internet you don't want being made public. It's not like it takes even super-
uber-hacker levels of skill to get somebody else's "private" data on the web.
All it takes is for somebody who is granted access to your "private" data to
look at your web page or email, and then copy-and-paste, or take a screenshot,
take a photograph, screenshare, or have someone else be looking over their
shoulder at the time. And once that initial copy/fork is made, the copied data
can live forever and is infinitely sharable/viral.

When I first learned of MySpace and Facebook, and what people were doing on
them and uploading to them I thought, "This will not end well." Turns out, I
was right.

~~~
CamperBob
_While I don't like the direction Facebook has been going in regarding
privacy, I am one of the folks of the position that it is not wise to put
stuff on the Internet you don't want being made public._

The whole problem is that Facebook takes your Internet visibility out of your
hands, and puts it in the hands of your "friends." Meaning, people who don't
realize that you might not want photos of underage drinking or that summer
camp in Pakistan posted in public and tagged with your name.

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motters
"Don't post it if you don't want it to be public" surely implies that email is
a public broadcasting medium. Technically this is true, but that's not how
most people think of email, including businesses and legal entities.

~~~
thunk
This is the crux of the issue. Where's the line between email and Facebook?
"If you don't want it public, don't put it on the web," they say. But that's
way too simplistic. Webmail's on the web, and we (and the law) certainly have
different expectations of _it_. So where's the line? And how evil is it to
pull a Facebook-style privacy bait-and-switch? There's a privacy spectrum
between email and Twitter, and FB is somewhere in between.

Don't get me wrong -- I haven't taken sides, and can't be arsed to care,
having never gotten involved with FB.

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caminodriver
I think the inclusion of that IM chat is about the metaphor. Anything you say
can eventually be public.

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bitsai
So we should all run our own email servers, then?

~~~
spudlyo
I can't speak for ya'all, but my email stays stored on my IMAP server on my
personal box. If somebody wants my email, they'll have to get it from me. All
of my mail filtering rules work on the server side, and I get a consistent
view of my inbox and folders from all of my IMAP clients.

The thought that software is groveling my email in order to send targeted
advertisements to me I find repugnant. Perhaps it's because I formed my ideas
about how the Internet should work before it was commercialized.

~~~
drivebyacct
Ding ding ding! I do the exact same thing, though my mail filtering server
side was more of a side effect of Android's mail clients not being able to do
filtering and me being tired of my phone buzzing every 30 seconds alerting me
of new spam.

------
Keyframe
19 years old and millions of dollars before. People change. I know I have over
time and money - especially money, more money makes you more tame.

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vrode
does any one cares for privacy as much as media would presume?

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drivebyacct
I'm tired of the implications that users are dumb and are the only people to
blame for this debacle. My privacy settings were altered to be more public
after this latest round of changes. Instant Personalization added half a dozen
apps (some of them literally compromising personal information based on
various websites I visited that automatically got access to my data) without
my consent.

There are tons of stupid users that don't bother to check their privacy
settings but I swear to God, I've edited and locked down mine 4-5 times in the
last six months and I have to be vigilant about it because THEY SILENTLY
CHANGE THE PRIVACY POLICY & TOS AND RESET MY PRIVACY SETTINGS.

Let's all go against the flow and defend Facebook. Right.

~~~
jrwoodruff
His point is that the expectation of privacy on the internet is not wise.
Despite the privacy settings on your account, you've already handed data over
to a (in this case) for-profit company.

If you wouldn't want to share it with the clerk at the grocery store, don't
put it on the internet. Period.

~~~
cookiecaper
How often do you email confidential business data? Or log into a company
intranet or VPN? How often do you send love letters or personal notes to a
(potential) significant other? etc.

There are lots of uses for the internet where privacy is expected. Perhaps a
better thing to say is "If you don't want it shared, don't put it on a social
networking website".

It's true that once digitized, content can be very difficult to contain, but
there _are_ ways to communicate over the internet and maintain a reasonable
expectation of privacy.

The thing with Facebook is that they've promised certain things, like that
you'd have to authorize anyone before they had access to any of your data, or
that certain things would remain friends-only, or whatever, and then they've
renegged on these promises. They betrayed and jeopardized their users for
their own immediate profit. Do you think that's something we should just write
off as "well, don't put things on the internet"?

It's not like a bunch of nude photos that someone uploaded to a server in a
public directory and hoped no one would ever stumble across them. For that,
you can say "well, be careful what you put on the internet, because it's just
as accessible to everyone else as it is to you", but when a company makes a
covenant not to share certain data and then breaks it, I don't think it's
really fair to expect users to expect that behavior.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
The IM conversation that started this whole topic was not a social service,
yet it, too, is public.

If you don't want it shared, don't put on the internet.

(Well, at least, not until my startup is shipping its product. Then you'll be
fine.)

------
Amanjeev
Facebook is just another place where I have 'contacts'. I rarely comment on
anyone's picture, status etc., I never post anything, never initiate
conversation unless the person I know is only available via Facebook.

I do not need any graph to see how FB screwed up its privacy policies over the
years. I have been there and seen all that. Call me a security freak, but
doing all of the above has saved me so far.

And above all, my wife has already deleted the account. :)

