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I wonder why we are seeing more issues about Facebook privacy issues recently. Is it because the coverage of this has made people start questioning their polic

I wonder why we are seeing more issues about Facebook privacy issues recently. Is it because the coverage of this has made people start questioning their policies and looking into things that have not been researched or is Facebook becoming more lacksidasical about privacy as time passes? Or, have these things been said a lot in the past, and we are just now realizing the plethora of complaints?

corywatilo 16y ago
Most of the recent stories are people whining about Facebook's policies and complexity of privacy settings. This is an actual privacy bug.
- ambition 16y ago
  Did you report it to Facebook before publicizing it?
andreyf 16y ago
It's a self-reinforcing problem: I imagine most startups that grow as fast as Facebook don't have a perfectly engineered architecture, simply because they're desperately optimizing their products for time-to-market. When the "Facebook has security and privacy issues, and might be evil" meme gets around, people start looking for more weaknesses and quickly find them. From my limited experience in startups, none would be immune to such scrutiny. Facebook is at a very challenging point right now: they need strong short-term PR, very fast patching up of issues as they arise, cleaning out the tech debt they acquired in their youth, and most importantly, battling off the fierce competitors of all stripes and colors: from Google to Twitter to foursquare. Will they be able to do it? Based mostly on their ability to capture as large a market as they did and their fast attention to issues as they arise, I think so: as long as they don't piss off their users enough for them to leave en masse (and they haven't - most of their users don't care about the privacy issues we go crazy over), they just need to hold on and keep doing more or less what they've been doing.
- tokenadult 16y ago
  I imagine most startups that grow as fast as Facebook don't have a perfectly engineered architecture, simply because they're desperately optimizing their products for time-to-market. When the "Facebook has security and privacy issues, and might be evil" meme gets around, people start looking for more weaknesses and quickly find them. This sounds like by far the most likely explanation for most of the Facebook problems. The Facebook non-system has become sufficiently internally complicated that no one person understands it anymore, which makes it easy to overlook security weaknesses. The systematic attempts to "share" information on the part of Facebook's leadership have been quite annoying, and have made me MUCH more circumspect in my Facebook behavior, but all the rest of this is just sheer inadvertence.
sounddust 16y ago
Because there have been a lot of legitimate Facebook privacy issues recently? When the world's second largest site allows you to monitor the private chats of 400 million people - when it leaks your IP address to other people via e-mail for no reason - and now when it's leaking people's e-mail, then it's a big deal. That's not even taking into consideration the privacy issues that were not bugs.
- natrius 16y ago
  Facebook leaked your IP people you communicated with, not that IPs are that sensitive in the first place. It wasn't a big deal.
  - sounddust 16y ago
    No, they leaked IP addresses of people I never communicated with. See my comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1330041 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1330041 I still have these mails in my inbox. People who I've never met nor conversed with online in my life. And whether it's sensitive depends on the context. Revealing one's IP reveals their location, and I can think of many cases in which this is sensitive information.
    - natrius 16y ago
      All those things are communication. Comment threads leaking IP addresses is slightly different from email in that you can only reply all, but it's not that huge of a leap. Unless someone knows exactly how the internet works, getting their IP address via social engineering is trivial. Facebook's behavior was not a big deal, though fixing it was a positive thing.

corywatilo 16y ago

Most of the recent stories are people whining about Facebook's policies and complexity of privacy settings. This is an actual privacy bug.

ambition 16y ago
Did you report it to Facebook before publicizing it?

andreyf 16y ago

It's a self-reinforcing problem: I imagine most startups that grow as fast as Facebook don't have a perfectly engineered architecture, simply because they're desperately optimizing their products for time-to-market. When the "Facebook has security and privacy issues, and might be evil" meme gets around, people start looking for more weaknesses and quickly find them. From my limited experience in startups, none would be immune to such scrutiny. Facebook is at a very challenging point right now: they need strong short-term PR, very fast patching up of issues as they arise, cleaning out the tech debt they acquired in their youth, and most importantly, battling off the fierce competitors of all stripes and colors: from Google to Twitter to foursquare. Will they be able to do it? Based mostly on their ability to capture as large a market as they did and their fast attention to issues as they arise, I think so: as long as they don't piss off their users enough for them to leave en masse (and they haven't - most of their users don't care about the privacy issues we go crazy over), they just need to hold on and keep doing more or less what they've been doing.

tokenadult 16y ago
I imagine most startups that grow as fast as Facebook don't have a perfectly engineered architecture, simply because they're desperately optimizing their products for time-to-market. When the "Facebook has security and privacy issues, and might be evil" meme gets around, people start looking for more weaknesses and quickly find them. This sounds like by far the most likely explanation for most of the Facebook problems. The Facebook non-system has become sufficiently internally complicated that no one person understands it anymore, which makes it easy to overlook security weaknesses. The systematic attempts to "share" information on the part of Facebook's leadership have been quite annoying, and have made me MUCH more circumspect in my Facebook behavior, but all the rest of this is just sheer inadvertence.

sounddust 16y ago

Because there have been a lot of legitimate Facebook privacy issues recently? When the world's second largest site allows you to monitor the private chats of 400 million people - when it leaks your IP address to other people via e-mail for no reason - and now when it's leaking people's e-mail, then it's a big deal. That's not even taking into consideration the privacy issues that were not bugs.

natrius 16y ago
Facebook leaked your IP people you communicated with, not that IPs are that sensitive in the first place. It wasn't a big deal.
- sounddust 16y ago
  No, they leaked IP addresses of people I never communicated with. See my comment here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1330041 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1330041 I still have these mails in my inbox. People who I've never met nor conversed with online in my life. And whether it's sensitive depends on the context. Revealing one's IP reveals their location, and I can think of many cases in which this is sensitive information.
  - natrius 16y ago
    All those things are communication. Comment threads leaking IP addresses is slightly different from email in that you can only reply all, but it's not that huge of a leap. Unless someone knows exactly how the internet works, getting their IP address via social engineering is trivial. Facebook's behavior was not a big deal, though fixing it was a positive thing.