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Facebook Calls All Hands Meeting On Privacy
- DrSprout 16y agoI suspect they didn't realize how many people, when faced with the mangling of their profiles, replacing all of their interests with poorly and inconsistently guessed 'likes,' would simply get rid of all that data. It's really interesting looking at Facebook in Spanish, their localization with these roll-outs is pretty slipshod. "Mark as read" showed up in English for over a month after the big PHP-compiling to C++ shift, which otherwise was pretty good. Likewise, though my profile is written in English, Facebook took it upon itself to guess what everything meant, and translate it into actual books and such. The result was actually remarkably effective, but still imperfect, and plain text is simply a better data model for what should be a simple "here's who I am."
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- natrius 16y ago> plain text is simply a better data model for what should be a simple "here's who I am." I disagree. Plain text is ambiguous. Links to pages aren't. The links also create a graph of people and their interests, which could have useful applications. The changes that Facebook has made will make it more useful. Other than Instant Personalization, the privacy implications of the changes have been clearly communicated, and it's easy to choose what you do or don't want to share. The parts of the profile that can't be made private weren't very private in the first place.
- jfarmer 16y agoThey're only ambiguous to machines. Humans can read it just fine.
- natrius 16y agoIf someone lists "curling" as an interest, it's ambiguous even to humans. Weightlifting or obscure winter sport? Even if it were only ambiguous to machines, there are probably useful things that can be done by machines with the data that will now be disambiguated, which sounds like a plus to me.
- bonaldi 16y agoThey linked LaTeX to a page for fans of latex. What was that about ambiguity?
- natrius 16y agoMy point wasn't that their auto-linking would be great. My point is that after the changes sort themselves out and people fix things that Facebook got wrong, the data will be more useful to work with than plain text.
- bruceboughton 16y agoI'm not sure there could be two more different interests...
- indigoviolet 16y agoYou're wrong about too many people getting rid of their data. [I work at Facebook]
- dpritchett 16y ago[citation needed]
- nostrademons 16y agoYou know that he probably can't provide that info, right?
- jacquesm 16y agoOf course. But that's the GPs whole point, he can't be providing info, either to confirm or to deny so it is relatively moot. We can choose to believe him because he's a HN'er of long and good standing (which I am inclined to do) or not (because there is no way to prove it and he does work for the company mentioned and that is not always the best source of information for things like this). I'm quite sure he speaks the truth in an absolute sense. Maybe 50,000 or 100,000 people have canceled, maybe even only 10,000. But that was how every other social network that preceded facebook died off, by the first relatively large group of users that said 'enough'. What goes up quickly can go down just as fast, if any social network that is perceived as 'more secure' and 'less evil' in combination with 'nice to the users' gains traction with those leaving now then this could very well follow the exact same graph that caused FB to grow so fast. This is not a 'sure thing' by any means, though probably the effect will be limited. Once it starts feeding back on itself or if facebook has one or two more security booboos all bets are off.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- andreyf 16y agoSeriously? Aside from a minority fraction of the techies, do you really think facebook users care about this?
- jf 16y agoI replaced my interest with SQL injection statements.
- slapshot 16y ago[x] Mark Zuckerberg and 6 other friends are attending Privacy Meeting.
- joubert 16y agowhere's the unlike hyperlink?
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- bonaldi 16y agoDon't expect a reversal. This meeting will be because staff are seeing their peers suddenly hating them on their favourite forums, and execs are seeing the media having a pop. It's to reassure the troops, to tell them "we're right, here's our strategy, the rest of the world are idiots, carry on". Forget Google, these guys are the new Microsoft.
- Andys 16y agoReminds me of the all-hands meeting Microsoft had a few years ago concerning security flaws.
- _pius 16y agoMicrosoft made a tremendous turn-around in security after that meeting ...
- _flag 16y agoI think that may be the point.
- abstractbill 16y agoPrior to the Microsoft all-hands meeting though, MS hadn't been deliberately making insecure software. Once they decided to focus on it, all they had to do was to execute. On the other hand, Facebook's recent privacy changes have (presumably) come from the top. So if they call an all-hands meeting, it seems like it can only be to either say "we've changed our minds", or "the public are wrong, and we won't change our minds". I can't see much of an actionable outcome for FB staff, unlike after the MS meeting.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- MikeCapone 16y agoWarning, I'm going to plug my personal blog: > Forget Google, these guys are the new Microsoft. I wrote something about this recently. I think the reason why Google and Facebook are acting very differently can be explained in good part by the kind of incentives that they face (they're very different): http://michaelgr.com/2010/02/15/why-google-is-not-like-microsoft-or-facebook/ http://michaelgr.com/2010/02/15/why-google-is-not-like-micro...
- whyenot 16y agoIt's probably too late. Not to regain user's trust, it doesn't appear most users actually care about Facebook's privacy issues. No, I think it's too late to avoid the creation and eventual passage of some "protect the children" laws that at least a few politicians are almost certainly working on right now.
- Silhouette 16y agoIf I were an exec at Facebook, I wouldn't worry about laws, I'd worry about a small project in some CompSci student's garage that is going to turn into an open, fully encrypted, freely available, direct competitor within the next year. One potential rival service has been all over the geek news sites for the past day or two after raising a significant level of funding via donations very quickly. No doubt there are dozens more experiments out there that might turn out to be the next big social network instead...
- acgourley 16y agoIt's an oversimplification to see facebook as one product that can be replaced by another product. Facebook as it is now fulfills a lot of roles, some roles are going to see competition, some roles like facebook connect are here to stay.
- Silhouette 16y agoI'm sure Facebook would like to be some sort of all-emcompassing platform, but its main value has always been the "self-updating address book", which is useful if and only if almost everyone you know is on there. All the other stuff, the messaging and photo sharing and toy apps and personal information pages and so on, can already be done elsewhere as well or better than Facebook does it, except for the automatic links to friends and the security/networking that come with that. If Facebook either loses a significant number of people in someone's friendship group to a rival system or loses the privacy/networking effects by making almost everything public, its value is going to drop very quickly for a lot of users and a vicious circle of people leaving is likely to follow.
- nfnaaron 16y ago"Facebook has come under increasing scrutiny for a number of reasons and many were left with a sour taste in their mouth following a New York Times reader Q&A with Elliot Schrage, the company’s Vice President for Public Policy." Vice President for Public Policy. What does "Public" mean? If I hide him from my friends, is he then invisible to my friends but still "public" and accessible by facebook's partners and affiliates? I'm so confused.
- qeorge 16y agoIf anyone from FB is reading, its responses like this one (from the linked NYT article) that are leaving the sour taste: "Our extensive efforts to provide users greater control over what and how they share appear to be too confusing for some of our more than 400 million users." - Elliot Schrage, VP public policy @ Facebook What an asshole.
- nfnaaron 16y ago"... many privacy advocates want further changes involved with Facebook’s new social plugins, as many of them function when a user isn’t logged in ..." Wait, what? What plugins operate when I'm not logged in? What did I miss?
- natrius 16y agoI think the article is wrong.
- Raphael 16y agoI generally find the log out action to not actually work.
- thesethings 16y agoAgreesies. I just logged out today after seeing 3rd party sites being too Facebook aware, and even regular Facebook still thought my session was hot, let alone 3rd party sites who are harder to gauge.
- chronomex 16y agoForget that, the "deactivate profile" function barely works. I deactivated my profile last Monday. Out of habit, today I went to Facebook from another computer that still had a session cookie. It reactivated my account, no questions asked.
- nfnaaron 16y agoIn the NYT Q&A linked from the article, VP Elliot Schrage gives a link to his profile and Zuckerberg's. Zuckerberg's is a good link. Schrage's is not found. Bad link, or item three for tomorrow's meeting? Edit: typo.
- Sam_Odio 16y agoThis meeting isn't an all hands, it's an employee-driven open forum. It was schduled because there has been interest around the public's recent reaction to facebook's privacy decisions. I don't expect any announcemets to be made, just a discussion to be had. One lesson I learned from the internal response: Many Facebook engineers read HN. Your opinions are being heard.
- iamdave 16y agoBut are they listening? Hearing me and listening to me aren't the same. Just go look at all those groups "We want a dislike" button, obviously the users want something and Facebook just sat back and went "Uh. No"
- derefr 16y agoListening to someone and deciding to agree with them aren't the same, either. Parents listen to their children asking for unhealthy foods, and then deny it to them. Facebook knew that a dislike button would hurt their userbase sociologically just as much as any HFCS-laced soda would physiologically (it would allow people a quick, automatable way to bully others, it was shown when a closed test was attempted to be taken far out of proportion by the recipient compared to the signaler's intent, etc.) That's not to say that Facebook's current privacy attitude is "healthy" for its users (and it's not to say that it's unhealthy, either); it's simply that Facebook has to consider their userbase as a society with interactions, which can't be swayed by the aggregate opinion of self-interested individuals who aren't thinking about how what they want will affect others.
- jfager 16y agoDidn't Facebook already have its come-to-Jesus moment with the Beacon fiasco? I have a hard time buying the idea that FB could come out of that without an ingrained institutional awareness of privacy issues but now, with this, be willing to listen and change.
- iamelgringo 16y agoThanks, Sam.
- pasbesoin 16y agoThis is what US$50,000 (and rising) in donations buys you (for Diaspora). (Hopefully, it will also buy an interesting and valuable project/product, in the long run.) Being about money, the Facebook executive suite takes notice when people start putting significant (aggregate) coin towards their replacement. (My statement's a bit facetious, but the level of participation -- and contributions -- doubtless has contributed in finally convincing them this all is more than just "some d-mned users b-tching".) The thing is, we've had long enough, and enough distinct events and changes, to see their true stripe. I hope people won't be lulled back into complacency by any diversionary actions they may take nor by any placating language they may issue. If they temporarily retreat, just remember Beacon.