
Facebook Has Quietly Implemented A De-Facto Follow Feature - stevederico
http://techcrunch.com/2010/09/20/facebook-not-now-follow/
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statictype
The privacy angle looks like a non-issue to me. Your public items get added to
their news feed. They could view that information even if they didn't issue a
friend request.

~~~
notahacker
Agreed. I suspect people have their newsfeeds set to "friends only", in which
case the "de-facto follow feature" shouldn't work unless the friend request is
accepted.

~~~
kmfrk
You can also have private accounts on Twitter, so make what you want of the
analogy.

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Qz
My distaste for Facebook grows deeper every time they do this crap.

~~~
drdaeman
I don't see any actual problem with those exact changes — well, actually, I
don't get all that "oh noes, information I've specifically made _public_ , is
being read by others! my privacy is being violated!1" thing.

I believe when one publishes something as visible for everyone he must assume
that _everyone and his mom_ will read that. Being "public but private" is
logical nonsense, possible just because most of time nobody cares about your
data.

The _real crap_ they do is when some part of data I've made private becomes
publicily visible. I remember about Perl's excellent "taint mode" each time
they do this. Or when there's a new hard-to-notice opt-out feature which may
expose something I didn't explicitly wanted to show.

What they really added this time is a somehow useful ability to completely
"not notice" someone's request. Or I'm wrong?

~~~
pierrefar
I think what your argument centers on is when you say " _must assume_ " it
will be viewable by everyone. The way I see it, Facebook started as a
_private_ communication channel: only my friends can see what I write. Over
time this has evolved into a very public channel but users are not aware about
the changes.

To me, this is a bait and switch move much like Scribd's switch to a paywall.
See this discussion from yesterday
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1709308> , particularly this thread about
why such a switch is perceived as a betrayal of trust by users
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1709593> .

~~~
lionhearted
> The way I see it, Facebook started as a private communication channel ...
> [and] has evolved into a very public channel...

Sorry to snip up your comment like that, but I did it to make a point that
agrees with you - I think you gotta assume everything on Facebook these days
is potentially accessible to anyone looking closely into you, and treat it as
such. The problem isn't so much that Facebook is now a public medium, it's
that some people aren't treating it that way.

~~~
pierrefar
Absolutely agree. What irks me, and I think others, is that people are still
using it privately and that's because Facebook is switching defaults, hiding
them behind confusing settings, and not talking about them. That's very wrong
in my book.

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greenlblue
He makes a great point at the end about beefing up the network effect and he
is right. This is just another way to pump more noise into peoples' feeds.

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pierrefar
Today Facebook is really asking for bad press about its default user settings.
This just made it to the BBC: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1711973>

~~~
aw3c2
why not link directly to the BBC?

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-
herts-113763...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-
herts-11376350)

~~~
pierrefar
Because I thought it was a relevant (if still nascent) discussion here on HN.

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kmfrk
And the stalkers rejoiced.

