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While the motivations of the creators of the privacy policies and options might be pure, the fact that the settings are confusing enough that people are exposin

by martey 17y ago

While the motivations of the creators of the privacy policies and options might be pure, the fact that the settings are confusing enough that people are exposing information that they want to keep private is pretty damnable. If Facebook cares about protecting the data of their users, making the privacy settings more intuitive would be more productive than worrying about needing to "educate" users. This includes having default options that hide data instead of making it public.

nfnaaron 17y ago
"the fact that the settings are confusing enough that people are exposing information that they want to keep private is pretty damnable." The information is being exposed, not because of confusion, but because Facebook wants the information exposed (to business partners and affiliates). The confusion leads to surprise, not exposure. "making the privacy settings more intuitive would be more productive than worrying about needing to "educate" users." This was exactly my thought earlier in the thread. If it's this hard to understand and explain, there's some simplification yet to be done.
indigoviolet 17y ago
Of course it would be best if the settings were so simple that no education were necessary. But my claim is (a) for a site like Facebook to work "well" [where we can argue ad infinitum what "well" means], some information needs to be shared in the system, and some needs to be private. (b) this is often different for different groups of people. You now have to implement a privacy system that works for every piece of content, for every set of users that I want to define a setting for. I think you'll quickly come to something fairly complicated. There are very smart people trying to come up with abstractions and interfaces that make this easy to do, but I fear that at the end of the day, users are simply going to have to learn some new tricks if they don't want to be surprised. And that means, we have to figure out how to explain this complex system to them.

by martey 17y ago

nfnaaron 17y ago

"the fact that the settings are confusing enough that people are exposing information that they want to keep private is pretty damnable." The information is being exposed, not because of confusion, but because Facebook wants the information exposed (to business partners and affiliates). The confusion leads to surprise, not exposure. "making the privacy settings more intuitive would be more productive than worrying about needing to "educate" users." This was exactly my thought earlier in the thread. If it's this hard to understand and explain, there's some simplification yet to be done.

indigoviolet 17y ago

Of course it would be best if the settings were so simple that no education were necessary. But my claim is (a) for a site like Facebook to work "well" [where we can argue ad infinitum what "well" means], some information needs to be shared in the system, and some needs to be private. (b) this is often different for different groups of people. You now have to implement a privacy system that works for every piece of content, for every set of users that I want to define a setting for. I think you'll quickly come to something fairly complicated. There are very smart people trying to come up with abstractions and interfaces that make this easy to do, but I fear that at the end of the day, users are simply going to have to learn some new tricks if they don't want to be surprised. And that means, we have to figure out how to explain this complex system to them.