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Never Trust Facebook

wellpreparedmind.wordpress.com

171–180 of 201 posts

Re: Never Trust Facebook

#171

Facebook has value, but no matter what your privacy settings are set to, no matter what you delete, always assume that anything you write or do on Facebook - in any context - will be embarrassingly public. 1) Because it will and 2) because it just makes life easier. When my wife and I were first dating, for religious and cultural reasons her parents didn't know. Her parents are conservative Muslims and mine conservat…

How about instead of pushing this mindset to everyone using Facebook that "keep using it, just remember nothing is private", we push the mindset of "just delete your Facebook account, it's bad for you" instead?

I'm getting tired of people finding excuses for Facebook like "hey, you should've known it's bad, just don't do that, and then it's fine". How about you stop using it?

Re: Never Trust Facebook

#172
Facebook always does this. Everytime there's a privacy policy change in some way, they restore everything to default (public) again.

Re: Never Trust Facebook

#173
post #80
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are way too easy on FB for destroying your girlfriend's relationship with her parents. Clearly, FB deserves at least some of the blame. Without your consent, they made private photos public. You didn't do that. You used their privacy settings which they created to prevent this type of situation. To have FB disregard their own privacy settings is 100% on them. But, instead of blaming FB, you blame yourself. In lig…

On the contrary I think that his view is far more realist than yours. Her girlfrind gave her private picture to a third source. If you want to keep information secret you never give it away, not on internet not on the real life. Is not like facebook went to her homea amd took the pictures from her camera. I don't think that facebook did a good job here of course. But it's more that it acted like a catalizer in a situ…

Enough with this "3rd party" bullshit. Just because they are a 3rd party, doesn't mean they can make everything about you public, or hand it over to whoever.

They agreed to keep your stuff private under their settings, and then they just unilaterally decide that it should be public? Screw that. This could be a winnable class action lawsuit.

Re: Never Trust Facebook

#174
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are way too easy on FB for destroying your girlfriend's relationship with her parents. Clearly, FB deserves at least some of the blame. Without your consent, they made private photos public. You didn't do that. You used their privacy settings which they created to prevent this type of situation. To have FB disregard their own privacy settings is 100% on them. But, instead of blaming FB, you blame yourself. In lig…

While true, it's not like this wouldn't have happened eventually anyway. Were they going to keep this relationship secret from her parents forever? How well would that ultimately work out?

But the question is, was it Facebook's right to decide that? Or theirs?

Re: Never Trust Facebook

#175
"My name is Scott Renfro, and I’m a software engineer at Facebook working on security and privacy. We’ve put a lot of work into making deletions permanent"

Had to LOL at this comment

Re: Never Trust Facebook

#176
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are not going to be happy if you are not honest to your beliefs.

Not true. You can be really honest to your beliefs and have a miserable life specifically because of that. I have deleted by FB account twice and then I was spending lots of time explaining why, getting weird looks from people and being left out of comments (e.g. people would post something to FB and be laughing about it later but never explain about what.. really impolite of them but what can I do? engage in more ar…

Well for me, sharing my beliefs with friends makes me happy. If someone does not share or respects my beliefs, then there is no sharing and understanding each other which is the essence of a friendship.

No matter how strange your beliefs are, you will always find people that think similar. The world is very diverse.

It seems that FB even changes the fundamental meaning of a friend. Which is a shame and a lack of social culture.

Re: Never Trust Facebook

#178
post #79

One thing that has always bothered me it's that if you ever decide to post a comment on a site that uses the Facebook commenting system and you decide not to publish that comment on your timeline, then you have no way of recovering it (and thus deleting it, if you ever decide so). You have to resort to search engines that behave poorly for this kind of things. I admit that after some mishaps Facebook has greatly impr…

Is it not even present in the "Activity Log" screen?

No, it's not. If they're not on your timeline they're gone forever.

Re: Never Trust Facebook

#180

My name is Scott Renfro, and I’m a software engineer at Facebook working on security and privacy. I thought I'd post the comment I submitted on the original blog post here as well. We’ve put a lot of work into making deletions permanent, so I can imagine how frustrated you must be. I’m pretty sure those story deletions are permanent, and I can’t think of any place where we can or do automatically restore user-deleted…

>We’ve put a lot of work into making deletions permanent, so I can imagine how frustrated you must be

It shouldn't be necessary to put a lot of work. Just delete the content, clobber it with blank fields, or randomized content. It really is very easy.

The problem is that your company's policy is to never truly delete content despite calling it "delete", there are many ways to weasel-word it ("many software subsystems don't truly delete" blah blah) but when someone asks a third party to delete something (s)he doesn't ask for it to have it marked deleted. Just delete it.

Surely not your fault though.

PS: there's no money in this world so that I'd work for a company with the morals and values of Facebook.

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