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I don't understand how it is unethical at all. It is very clearly mentioned, in less than two lines of text, with detailed explanations one click away. What do

I don't understand how it is unethical at all. It is very clearly mentioned, in less than two lines of text, with detailed explanations one click away. What do you suggest instead?

mikeknoop 16y ago
In my personal opinion, I argue that the effort to make before-private settings now-public with user confirmation is the "unethical" part, not necessarily the implementation. I will cede a point here: calling it unethical may be a little bit too strong. But I definitely do not agree with the decision, for the following reason: Knowing that a design change will cause a certain percentage of the user base to expose their personal information (which retroactively they did not wish to make public) while providing little added benefit to the end user is what bothers me. Facebook is known for its perseverance in the face of user complaints, which I can respect. I thoroughly agree that at times user complaints and petitions (such as those against the various site redesigns) are unfounded, as there is a clear greater good. I do not see the greater good of the new public-pages push, and thus, do not respect the effort to push user information into a more public space. If you could point out benefits users receive by making more of their information public, perhaps I could be convinced. [edited for spelling]
- indigoviolet 16y ago
  IMO, the benefits are from having your interests represented in a structured format. For example, you can now go to Pandora, and Pandora knows what music you like [and what music your friends like]. You can start actually building up an identity and using it across the web. There are tons of possibilities for features useful to users that come from having a structured list of what you like and don't like. Hopefully you'll see Facebook make good on the promise to give you more useful things based on the structured information in the near future. The privacy changes are a side effect of having these be connections instead of free text. Keep in mind the number of connections that an average user makes (all the Likes they attach to Pages, to Open Graph objects, friend connections) - would you have a Privacy control per connection? It's already not an easy task to keep the privacy controls so the average user can understand and use them correctly [and we can always improve this] -- just imagine the complexity we'd add to the system. What exists instead is the ability for you to control the visibility of all these connections on your own Profile. "Public" means that your association with these objects may appear elsewhere [for example, a friend may reveal that you're friends with them, or a Page may reveal you Like that Page.]. I think this is a decent balance between giving the user what they want primarily (to control whether visitors to their Profile see that they are connected to something), and managing overall complexity. [Edit: this is my opinion, I perhaps don't know enough about the privacy decisions to represent them completely. ]
iamdave 16y ago
Any UI engineer worth his paycheck should know how users feel about dialog boxes that aren't manually triggered. They get in the way, users want to bypass them however possible, and they'll click wildly just to get to the other side of the fence. It's not "unethical" in the strictest since of the word, but I'm sure you'll have a very hard time telling me it isn't an underhanded tactic just to make the user do what you want.
- indigoviolet 16y ago
  What would you suggest instead?
  - iamdave 16y ago
    What would I suggest? I would suggest hiring UI engineers who actually perform A/B testing before rolling out another design iteration before users can even get used to them, and then I would apply those same principles of testing to things like this. Secondly, I would give users better options what you're giving them right now. Letting FB do Link data automatically, or letting the user do it him/herself is a false choice if the user doesn't want to participate at all. The means lead to the same end, and the user is coerced into making a choice one way or another. Thirdly: I would do a MUCH better job of designing these dialog boxes to inform users of what's about to happen. As it stands, users are simply going to think their data is simply getting reformatted, when that is not the case at all. That's what I suggest, but honestly given the track record of Facebook actually listening to their user base, I honestly don't think any of what I said matters. Given that "what do you suggest" has been your retort on another comment very similar to mine. Let me remind you, by the way-before you make an attempt to inform me otherwise about the 'opt-out' choice-, users are not left with much solace if they don't want their profiles linked to public places. If you don’t want to connect to any Pages, the corresponding sections on your Profile will be empty. Connecting to Pages will now be the main way to express yourself on your profile, and you can always edit your profile to remove specific suggested Pages that you don't want to connect to. This comes from your own FAQ on Facebook.com. What you're in essence saying, is that the only way users can tell their friends about where they've worked, where they've gone to school, what they are interested in, is to subject themselves to the public atmosphere that is Facebook Pages 2.0. No. Absolutely not. I'm not buying that at all.

I don't understand how it is unethical at all. It is very clearly mentioned, in less than two lines of text, with detailed explanations one click away. What do you suggest instead?

mikeknoop 16y ago

In my personal opinion, I argue that the effort to make before-private settings now-public with user confirmation is the "unethical" part, not necessarily the implementation. I will cede a point here: calling it unethical may be a little bit too strong. But I definitely do not agree with the decision, for the following reason: Knowing that a design change will cause a certain percentage of the user base to expose their personal information (which retroactively they did not wish to make public) while providing little added benefit to the end user is what bothers me. Facebook is known for its perseverance in the face of user complaints, which I can respect. I thoroughly agree that at times user complaints and petitions (such as those against the various site redesigns) are unfounded, as there is a clear greater good. I do not see the greater good of the new public-pages push, and thus, do not respect the effort to push user information into a more public space. If you could point out benefits users receive by making more of their information public, perhaps I could be convinced. [edited for spelling]

indigoviolet 16y ago
IMO, the benefits are from having your interests represented in a structured format. For example, you can now go to Pandora, and Pandora knows what music you like [and what music your friends like]. You can start actually building up an identity and using it across the web. There are tons of possibilities for features useful to users that come from having a structured list of what you like and don't like. Hopefully you'll see Facebook make good on the promise to give you more useful things based on the structured information in the near future. The privacy changes are a side effect of having these be connections instead of free text. Keep in mind the number of connections that an average user makes (all the Likes they attach to Pages, to Open Graph objects, friend connections) - would you have a Privacy control per connection? It's already not an easy task to keep the privacy controls so the average user can understand and use them correctly [and we can always improve this] -- just imagine the complexity we'd add to the system. What exists instead is the ability for you to control the visibility of all these connections on your own Profile. "Public" means that your association with these objects may appear elsewhere [for example, a friend may reveal that you're friends with them, or a Page may reveal you Like that Page.]. I think this is a decent balance between giving the user what they want primarily (to control whether visitors to their Profile see that they are connected to something), and managing overall complexity. [Edit: this is my opinion, I perhaps don't know enough about the privacy decisions to represent them completely. ]

iamdave 16y ago

Any UI engineer worth his paycheck should know how users feel about dialog boxes that aren't manually triggered. They get in the way, users want to bypass them however possible, and they'll click wildly just to get to the other side of the fence. It's not "unethical" in the strictest since of the word, but I'm sure you'll have a very hard time telling me it isn't an underhanded tactic just to make the user do what you want.

indigoviolet 16y ago
What would you suggest instead?
- iamdave 16y ago
  What would I suggest? I would suggest hiring UI engineers who actually perform A/B testing before rolling out another design iteration before users can even get used to them, and then I would apply those same principles of testing to things like this. Secondly, I would give users better options what you're giving them right now. Letting FB do Link data automatically, or letting the user do it him/herself is a false choice if the user doesn't want to participate at all. The means lead to the same end, and the user is coerced into making a choice one way or another. Thirdly: I would do a MUCH better job of designing these dialog boxes to inform users of what's about to happen. As it stands, users are simply going to think their data is simply getting reformatted, when that is not the case at all. That's what I suggest, but honestly given the track record of Facebook actually listening to their user base, I honestly don't think any of what I said matters. Given that "what do you suggest" has been your retort on another comment very similar to mine. Let me remind you, by the way-before you make an attempt to inform me otherwise about the 'opt-out' choice-, users are not left with much solace if they don't want their profiles linked to public places. If you don’t want to connect to any Pages, the corresponding sections on your Profile will be empty. Connecting to Pages will now be the main way to express yourself on your profile, and you can always edit your profile to remove specific suggested Pages that you don't want to connect to. This comes from your own FAQ on Facebook.com. What you're in essence saying, is that the only way users can tell their friends about where they've worked, where they've gone to school, what they are interested in, is to subject themselves to the public atmosphere that is Facebook Pages 2.0. No. Absolutely not. I'm not buying that at all.