Hey folks - thanks for the post. I'm an engineering manager at Facebook and worked a bit on this issue earlier today. As some people have pointed out, we've since pushed an update to the Graph API.
A bug in a recent update to our code caused this unintended availability of some metadata about the audience of posts. Keep in mind, the intended audience of the actual posts wasn't affected. So far, this is the only report we've received about the availability of the metadata, and we addressed the situation within a few hours.
As always, developers must abide by our Platform Policies, including obligations that protect the information they access through our APIs. For example, developers may not use someone's information outside of the application without the person's permission. Additionally, people can control whether applications have access to their information and posts through their settings.
What kinds of systems are in place to make sure private information stays private? Facebook invites so many people to spill their personal lives on the internet, and many of them are under the impression they have privacy and control over their data. When this trust is gone, everything about facebook will go through a mental-filter consisting of "What happens when Facebook's permissions bug-out, and my boss has full access to my profile?", and conversations will go the way of small-talk. I guess that's what people should be asking, but it seems only the tech-savvy realize there is no privacy.
Be assured that Facebook's permissions will bug out time and time again. Just like when Facebook changes or adds a new feature - permissions get clawed back to being public.
Why are people so forgetful about this? Maybe the answer is similar to why some people stay in abusive relationships.
> Maybe the answer is similar to why some people stay in abusive relationships.
As someone who was in an abusive relationship for a couple years, who found himself giving everything for nothing in return and not understanding why everything sucked: I can sort of see your point. The bits and pieces are there. But it's a really, really stretched metaphor.
Abusive relationships involve deeply personal manipulation and that's why they get such a hold over you. Consumer apathy is not even close to being directly convinced by someone you love - often using your own fears against you - to stop caring about your own needs.
I am one of the biggest fan of facebook's privacy settings and bat for them for providing such granular control. However, this has creeped the fuck out of me! I make extensive use of this feature and am going back through a bunch of posts reevaluating the settings knowing the person can see it.
Almost 100% of my posts in past 6 months have custom settings but there is no way I can go through each one of them.
This is HUGE from my perspective. I am typically the guy to tell others constantly bitching about fb's privacy settings to move on. But alas, the day has come when I am officially scared to use facebook.
> This is HUGE from my perspective. I am typically the guy to tell others constantly bitching about fb's privacy settings to move on. But alas, the day has come when I am officially scared to use facebook.
Um, what kinds of friends do you have on Facebook? Maybe you shouldn't be friending these people in the first place.
This isn't "tricky dick shenanigians", it's an oversight of one team working on one small part of the entire Facebook infrastructure. It is cool to hate Facebook on HN now, because they make a lot of money and the audience here is predominately trying to bootstrap a startup but that doesn't change the fact that one of the most popular and largest sites on the Internet has an issue which was developed most likely by a few engineers.
These amateur hour type comments which seem to always follow Facebook posts anymore seem to say more about the fact that more and more HN commenters have no experience working in an enterprise environment and believe their 10 instance AWS based startup they are currently involved with somehow is comparable to the Facebook ecosystem.
Who's hating on Facebook because they have money? I'm hating on Facebook because they can't secure a CRUD app, and don't really seem to care much either. This isn't the first occurrence of a permissions snafu, which tells me they should invest some more of their bundles into QA and testing. But then again, click-bots probably offer a better ROI.
Damage control != caring. Caring would be fixing their systems after the first few privacy fuck-ups. Why are you so determined to paint FB in the best of light?
Honest question. How many more breaches have to occur before you consider FB reckless? Or is your allegiance unconditional?
I'm not defending Facebook I just have actual experience working in real world enterprise size companies. My previous gig was as an engineer for one of the largest websites on the Internet. It employes thousands of engineers and software developers working on hundreds of different small teams who all release early and release often.
There isn't some magic wand that Zuck can somehow wave to prevent software bugs from occurring. That's how things actually work in the real world.
You're evading the question. How many more privacy breaches have to occur before you consider FB reckless? I'm not talking about security breaches, I'm talking about code being pushed that breaks expected privacy functionality.
This is especially pathetic considering they're "enterprise". You would think they engineered some kind of security test to check for these things. Why it's not in the build-process points to negligence in my eyes.
True privacy isn't hiding something from everyone; it does mean being able to share something with only the people you choose to share with.
For example, when we send an email, we are be pretty confident it only goes to the people we select and not the entire Internet. The vast majority of emails are only read by its intended audience. That's privacy.
I agree with you in general. E-mail has a little more structural security though, there are never world-wide glitches where everyone can access other people's private photos mailed years ago. (Think of the imgur dump of Zuck's private photos.)
Maybe you were under the illusion that there is privacy on the Internet. This should be a wakeup call.
If you are blocking posts for Person A, but not Person B, the moment Person A and Person B talk your "privacy settings" are over.
Even without this leaking in the JSON, people can TALK to each other, or show each other their Facebook accounts, and you can't control that. This applies to Facebook, Twitter DMs, Google+ circles, email, and whenever you think you are posting privately over the Internet.
There is privacy on the Internet. I think it is an illusion that you cannot have privacy on the Internet.
Sure, Person A can always DECIDE to talk to Person B. But that does not mean I voluntarily tell Person B everything that I only want Person A to know. This specific argument of yours doesn't even have much to do with the Internet.
You are basically saying it is useless to ever share anything with only a specific group of people because the specific group of people can always just talk to everyone else you don't wish to share the information with.
While them showing the Except list may be a bug, them listing out individual users you have made something visible to is a feature. I only started seeing it yesterday and just went back to delete any individual user-only post that I could easily remember having made. Here is what I see when I click on some of the custom icons:
"These are other people who can see ----'s post. When you share with a specific set of friends, they can see the audience. However, your friends can't see when you put them on a list like Close Friends or Acquaintances."
This feature makes NO SENSE. Please remove this, facebook.
You don't need best of the best to modify, most likely, one line of code. I'm pretty sure anyone who can code would modify it correctly. You need the best of the best who won't do this sort of issue in the first place.
I used to think I can tell fixes that require one line of code edit. But after having worked on couple of somewhat complicated projects, even the smallest of edits often impact at least some other system and even if they do not, because of the possibility that they may, you have to do rigorous QA. So yes, while this could easily be a 10 second fix for a new product with few users; facebook likely spent several hours to implement a fix for this,
I saw discussion of this a while back but unfortunately can't find the original link. The essence of the argument boils down to the purpose of privacy settings on postings; the concept of an "everybody can see this except Bob" setting is completely stupid from a traditional security perspective, but it makes sense if you're planning a surprise party. You don't expect Bob is going to try to circumvent the security AT ALL because it's like punching through a wet paper bag. It's like subtly tapping your watch at a party. It's not an unbreakable code, it doesn't need to be, it isn't meant to be.
Let's say you're upset with someone, want to vent so say it anonymously and restrict said person from seeing it, so you can vent publicly, and not embarrass anyone (presuming people wont be able to figure out via the post itself who you are talking about).
As soon as that person sees your Facebook account using the mobile phone of another friend of yours, the jig is up. Don't "vent publicly". Vent privately.
If you do this a lot, you will have publicly offended a lot of friends of yours and it will backfire one day. One day someone will know who you are venting about, and copy it and send it to them just for fun.
A bug in a recent update to our code caused this unintended availability of some metadata about the audience of posts. Keep in mind, the intended audience of the actual posts wasn't affected. So far, this is the only report we've received about the availability of the metadata, and we addressed the situation within a few hours.
As always, developers must abide by our Platform Policies, including obligations that protect the information they access through our APIs. For example, developers may not use someone's information outside of the application without the person's permission. Additionally, people can control whether applications have access to their information and posts through their settings.