
Zuck's Events (Facebook Privacy Hole Demo) - yef
http://zesty.ca/facebook/#/4/events
======
jpeterson
There will eventually be a great turning point on the web when everyone
finally understands most of the privacy issues and makes a decision on whether
they really want their lives to be private or not. If they go for privacy,
Facebook will fizzle out--their business model depends fundamentally on
invading privacy. If not, Facebook may just take over the world.

~~~
tewks
It's also worth noting that a lot of facebook's initial appeal, especially
when compared to Myspace at the time, beyond its aesthetic improvement, was
the fact that it seemed to stand for privacy. The status quo, myspace, was a
public-only profile. A facebook profile was accessible only to your contacts
or to your school. The available options have slowly but continuously drifted
away from that simple promise. A lot of the site's initial traction was driven
by huge demand for a reasonable set of privacy controls: myspace was useful
but creepy. The argument that the web has moved on in the past six years and
that the demand for privacy has lessened is perhaps a red herring, though only
time, consumer demand, and viable alternatives will tell: there might be more
of an opportunity here than people realize.

Overall, I think this is a really interesting question that society is
confronting and it will be fun to see how it plays out.

Side note: I think a lot of the tech press and blogosphere miss a lot of the
subtleties here because, well, people like Arrington, Scoble et al. weren't in
school at the time, making the cautious decision to open an account. This has
been a revolution led by young people, who are often surprisingly concerned
about their privacy and don't depend or plan on Internet celebrity for their
livelihoods. It feels a bit like eternal September except in reverse: as the
demographic ages, the basic tenents erode.

~~~
CGamesPlay
Can you enumerate on how the privacy settings are dwindling? Which ones? I
feel like I've had greater control over my privacy with more recent changes to
Facebook.

~~~
argv_empty
As an example, "Likes and Interests," "Education and Work," and parts of
"Basic Information" used to be text in your profile with a search link. That
search would only show people who had chosen (via privacy settings) to display
the relevant part of their profile to you. They are now group-like
"Connections" to community pages, whose membership is not secret.

------
milkshakes
It's worth noting that this information was already available publicly before
f8.

~~~
tewks
Set your privacy settings on lockdown and then put your own Id in instead of
"4". This is undesirable behavior.

~~~
smokinn
Are you sure? I'm checking myself and nothing is available other than my
profile photo.

/[my id]/events

data (empty)

Maybe his privacy settings aren't as stringent as mine?

~~~
milkshakes
It only works with publicly listed events

~~~
ori_b
But you could already look at publicly listed events and find out who was
attending. This - in principle - isn't exposing any more information than what
was previously there. It just makes it easier to access.

Sure, it still sucks. But it's not a major new security breach. All that it
exposes is already there.

------
riffer
Whatever you think of Mark Zuckerberg, you have to respect him for this. He
knows his information is available through the API, he has chosen to make it
publicly available.

It is ultimate dogfooding; equivalent to being able to see Eric's and Larry's
and Sergey's searches.

EDIT: blackswan is right; tamed down the comparison to Google in the last
phrase

~~~
CWuestefeld
On the other hand, his celebrity is now giving greater exposure to the
activities of his associates -- they're getting dragged in without much of a
choice. I don't think that's very noble of him at all.

------
aroon
I'm not sure why people are so offended by what Facebook has done. They've
just made the information people made publicly available _already_ easy to
parse for computers. Full disclosure: I had no way to prepare for Facebook's
new features and I haven't change a single privacy settings since it launched.
I just used this site to check what was publicly available for the first time
and none of it was a surprise except my events and I don't feel invaded in any
way. Feel free to browse around my profile.

<http://zesty.ca/facebook/#/aroon>

~~~
milkshakes
what bothers me is not that people can see what I've rsvp'd to, but that they
can see what I've been invited to, but ignored (unless i remove that event,
which must be done manually for each event).

My friends invite me to a lot of events that I _never_ want to publicly be
associated with, but unless I specifically remove this event, the whole world
can see it.

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JangoSteve
This seems to integrate exactly with your existing privacy settings, so I
guess there was no real surprise here. Mine were pretty much on lock-down
anyway. I found myself, and every single link except my profile picture and my
likes showed "data empty".

------
javajones
Is there another posting for this? I can't get to the article through the
link.

~~~
milkshakes
yup: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1294632>

