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No: Facebook can change the algo that picks the default setting of the visibility of your future posts. Software changes are rather easy at Facebook (although
by bertil 8y ago
No: Facebook can change the algo that picks the default setting of the visibility of your future posts.
Software changes are rather easy at Facebook (although that particular tool would surely have a ton of people monitoring it, including quantitative social scientists who don’t monitor a lot of pages). Changing the graph (stored information) is pretty much impossible without a lot of checks. That distinction is key to understand control at Facebook.
- compiler-guy 8y agoFacebook changed the visibility of the already-posted posts that had the bad default, without regard to user intent. All they did was decide to do it. Sure they have internal controls so a rogue engineer can't do it. But if Facebook, as a company, decides it wants to mess with your settings, it can, and it does. This event is an existence proof of that.
- bertil 8y agoTo reverse the visibility to private, you mean? I can’t start to imagine how they would do that, but “it took five days” points at a very kludgey hack.
- pdpi 8y ago> To reverse the visibility to private, you mean? And also making private anything you legitimately wanted made public, because they couldn't tell the difference.
- amatecha 8y agoThe privacy setting on a given FB post is most likely a list of which "friend groups" within your account can see the post, and modifying that value in the database would change how the post appears. Whatever you choose is just a different parameter that gets stored on that post and can trivially be modified on FB's side in the future. FB could make every post you've ever made show up as public, and update your profile to be completely public as well. It's completely technically possible, though not too likely to happen. Regarding the other point - the fact it took them 5 days to revert the privacy status on weeks' worth of posts of some ~14million users just points to them being thorough and _not_ doing it in a hacky manner. A hackish solution could have been done in an hour or two, most likely.
- bertil 8y agoSorry, I should have been clearer: I used to work there. Knowing how the information is stored and protected, I can’t imagine how one would do it.
- EnFinlay 8y ago> UPDATE posts SET public = true; 584,203,510,091,521 records updated
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoI broke out in a cold sweat just reading that.
- pritambaral 8y agoI think you were trying to distinguish 'Facebook' (the company / management at / powerful rogue agents in / whatever) and 'SWEs at Facebook', without actually calling them different things. Those are very different things, and your parent was rightly referring to the former.