Abusing Facebook's "Publicly Available Information"
nathanhammond.com
Abusing Facebook's "Publicly Available Information"
1–10 of 26 posts
Re: Abusing Facebook's "Publicly Available Information"
#2Someone should invent a new buzzword for people obsessed with privacy.
Re: Abusing Facebook's "Publicly Available Information"
#3It was a huge shock when I realized what Facebook was doing when they prompted me to update my privacy settings. Before, most of my profile was private. In the new privacy wizard, though, they had automatically selected for my posts (e.g. status updates, links) to be visible for everyone. Is this their plan for beings "more like Twitter"? Tricking people into making their posts visible to the world? I was about to just click "Next" without changing the settings (as I assumed they would keep them the same), but I'm glad I read closer.
Re: Abusing Facebook's "Publicly Available Information"
#4It may be a bit difficult to understand, but most people in the world are constantly shouting: I exist, look over here, notice me! That's why all the kids dream of being famous.
Understand it: People don't want their thoughts or their photos or their words to be private. Some do, but most want to be in the center of things, have everyone read what they say, have people talk back to them, even if they are strangers.
It seems to me the people who want to be as private as possible are the people who are already famous.
Re: Abusing Facebook's "Publicly Available Information"
#5Someone should invent a new buzzword for people obsessed with privacy.
This isn't obsession - I was shocked yesterday when Facebook prompted me to update my privacy settings, and I found that in several places they chose (by default) to loosen privacy in significant ways.
This is deliberate and sneaky - if someone just clicked through the dialog they'd automatically sign up to broadcast to the world what was before set as private communication.
Re: Abusing Facebook's "Publicly Available Information"
#6It was a huge shock when I realized what Facebook was doing when they prompted me to update my privacy settings. Before, most of my profile was private. In the new privacy wizard, though, they had automatically selected for my posts (e.g. status updates, links) to be visible for everyone. Is this their plan for beings "more like Twitter"? Tricking people into making their posts visible to the world? I was about to ju…
The thing that annoyed me was that I knew it was coming, I knew they were trying to trick me into making all my stuff public, and their little wizard still turned on a bunch of my photo albums to public.
I had to spend five minutes combing through their privacy tools to fix all the things their privacy wizard got wrong. My preferences aren't that hard- keep everything private to everyone but friends of friends, period, full stop.
Re: Abusing Facebook's "Publicly Available Information"
#7It was a huge shock when I realized what Facebook was doing when they prompted me to update my privacy settings. Before, most of my profile was private. In the new privacy wizard, though, they had automatically selected for my posts (e.g. status updates, links) to be visible for everyone. Is this their plan for beings "more like Twitter"? Tricking people into making their posts visible to the world? I was about to ju…
The thing that annoyed me was that I knew it was coming, I knew they were trying to trick me into making all my stuff public, and their little wizard still turned on a bunch of my photo albums to public. I had to spend five minutes combing through their privacy tools to fix all the things their privacy wizard got wrong. My preferences aren't that hard- keep everything private to everyone but friends of friends, perio…
Thanks for the reminder - I just went through and fixed all the fuckups the wizard made. That serves me for trusting Facebook to do something right.
Re: Abusing Facebook's "Publicly Available Information"
#8It may be a bit difficult to understand, but most people in the world are constantly shouting: I exist, look over here, notice me! That's why all the kids dream of being famous. Understand it: People don't want their thoughts or their photos or their words to be private. Some do, but most want to be in the center of things, have everyone read what they say, have people talk back to them, even if they are strangers. I…
I think you have a good point, but in this case Facebook seems to be doing this for their own marketing purposes, not to give customers anything they want, or even that Facebook thinks they want. I just finished trying to set all my privacy settings in Facebook to how I want them. I know exactly what I want. After many pages of pointing and clicking, at what should be on oen page, I still haven't found some of them.
Re: Abusing Facebook's "Publicly Available Information"
#9It was a huge shock when I realized what Facebook was doing when they prompted me to update my privacy settings. Before, most of my profile was private. In the new privacy wizard, though, they had automatically selected for my posts (e.g. status updates, links) to be visible for everyone. Is this their plan for beings "more like Twitter"? Tricking people into making their posts visible to the world? I was about to ju…
The thing that annoyed me was that I knew it was coming, I knew they were trying to trick me into making all my stuff public, and their little wizard still turned on a bunch of my photo albums to public. I had to spend five minutes combing through their privacy tools to fix all the things their privacy wizard got wrong. My preferences aren't that hard- keep everything private to everyone but friends of friends, perio…
Yeah, I had to go through my mother's account and fix that. She keeps almost everything as private as it can be (Friends only for most things), but the wizard changed her settings to completely the opposite of what she wanted. I'm wondering how feasible it is for technically illiterate people to go through and fix their privacy settings or know what the wizard is doing to their settings.
Re: Abusing Facebook's "Publicly Available Information"
#10My entire Facebook profile has been public for a while now. I've known for a while that this is the direction FB was going in, and I find it's much easier to answer the question "Am I okay with the whole world seeing this?" than weighing the probability that someone I didn't intend to see something will see something against the content of what I want to say.
Everything you put on the internet is public. If you're uncomfortable with some people seeing something you said or did, then don't put it online.