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But you shouldn't be able to just find things like that so easily. Sure if I go on a post I could find it but the fact Facebook notifies me of this in the first

But you shouldn't be able to just find things like that so easily. Sure if I go on a post I could find it but the fact Facebook notifies me of this in the first place is incredibly disrespectful.

csallen 7y ago
Not true, since the entire point of a social network like this is to browse a playground of publicly-visible conversations involving your friends, and the people conversing are quite aware they're doing so in public. What would be "disrespectful" is if Facebook told you what your friends were saying in private messages between each other.
- nashashmi 7y ago
  He is calling privacy the things that are hidden by obscurity. Meaning that if you have a sign on your door advertising sneakers for example, that is private to only those people who visit your door. Sure it may be out in the open, but you didnt open it to all people.
  - csallen 7y ago
    Totally, but a door is not a social network. A door is a fixed location. A social network is more like a magical bulletin board that tries to make itself as visible to as many people as possible. Perhaps you don't like that the bulletin board does that, but it's not rude. You're 100% free to not make posts there. I recommend it, in fact.
    - tru3_power 7y ago
      Yea but what if your profile is private? Wouldn’t you think that there still would be a level of privacy expectations that should be retained because only people you explicitly choose to share information with can see it? Why do corporations/advertisement get to bypass these constraints?
      - csallen 7y ago
        I may or may not agree… I'm not sure exactly what situation you're referring to. In the original article linked above, the situation was that users expected their social information to remain private to the ~100 friends they shared it with, and sued Facebook because it ended up in the hands of Cambridge Analytica. Facebook's attorney's counterpoint is that when you share information with friends, you give up any expectation of privacy as it pertains to these friends. And in this particular case, it was the friends who shared that information with some Facebook app by Kogan(sp?), who then shared it with Cambrige Analytica. I find the argument pretty convincing, actually. If you tell your friend a secret, and they tell someone else, even if it's a corporation, then that's that. If you share your Spotify playlist with a friend, and in turn they give up all their friends' playlists data (including yours) to some app, then imo that's kind of on you for sharing. The situation I disagree with is if you tell your friend a secret, and then the communication platform that you used to share that secret (your phone company, the hotel you're staying in, Gmail, Facebook, whatever) decides to share it with third parties.
- annadane 7y ago
  You know that button on FB called "share"? If I wanted someone to see something I'd press that or manually copy it into my status update. I don't want FB making the decisions for me and they've received feedback for it on their forums and refuse to fix it
  - csallen 7y ago
    We will just have to agree to disagree here, I suppose. The way I see it, it's Facebook's platform, and it's up to them to build features as they see fit. The news feed works how the news feed works. There's nothing to "fix," and there's nothing rude about it. It's just an optional feature on a website on the Internet, and of course you don't have to use it if you don't like it.
    - annadane 7y ago
      When FB essentially becomes the internet, they need to be receptive to the needs of their users. It's not informed consent to have features like that.
- vipref 7y ago
  > people conversing are quite aware This is not true
  - javagram 7y ago
    I doubt many people who use facebook don’t understand that they can see in the Newsfeed posts that weren’t addressed directly to them by their friends. That is the entire point of the Newsfeed. It was a big change when Facebook introduced the newsfeed back in 2006 or 2007 and I do remember people calling it the ‘stalker feed’ and there being a big facebook group with a million members asking for it to be removed. But people got over it, liked it, and instead of moving to myspace or one of the many alternative social networks stuck with facebook and facebook just got bigger and bigger thanks to users loving it.
    - lostmsu 7y ago
      I don't know about "liked it". "Did not stop using FB due to need to scroll through unrelated posts" would be a better description of what happened. We are just fortunate enough to be able to fix this problem for ourselves using a browser extension. Others just complain.
      - javagram 7y ago
        I don't know. At the time the Newsfeed was introduced (September 2006), Facebook was not the juggernaut it was today. There were other countries with social networks that had much stronger network effects locally (e.g. Orkut). Facebook only opened membership to non-college or high school students in Sept 2006 in fact - so if we had wanted to jump ship because of the 'stalker feed', there were still plenty of other options (e.g. MySpace) and the chance for a disruptor to launch if the other options weren't suitable. In practice, users chose to join Facebook and grow it to what we know it as now.
    - deleted 7y ago
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deleted 7y ago
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underwater 7y ago
What are you trying to achieve by allowing someone to see a fact, but not actively surfacing that information? Within the scope of X likes Y, X said Z, Facebook has a very consistent and strong privacy model [1]. However, they have long considered anything that isn't a hard privacy violation of their rules to be fair game. Technically (and this is FB's engineering mindset showing through) not surfacing information is security through obscurity. It seems like they are backing away from that model, by deprecating features like Graph Search. I personally think that this is worse because it makes it much harder for people to understand what is visible to others. It muddies the rule of "if you don't want people to know something, don't put it on Facebook". [1] There are some messier areas, like People You May Know, or when platform apps are allowed to access (and store) all they data that a person who uses that app could see.
michannne 7y ago
Think of it like an echo. If your friend shouts at someone in the real world when others are around, you wouldn't be able to hear it from a mile away, but eventually you will hear about the fact they did so, either through gossip or some other means. Facebook cuts that extraneous fluff out and just tells you what they said. It is far from a violation of privacy, as you would be able to find that information easily if you went out looking for it in the first place. Especially in the world of health, there is a clear distinction about what is private, public, and confidential/secret. This case very clearly public.

But you shouldn't be able to just find things like that so easily. Sure if I go on a post I could find it but the fact Facebook notifies me of this in the first place is incredibly disrespectful.

csallen 7y ago

Not true, since the entire point of a social network like this is to browse a playground of publicly-visible conversations involving your friends, and the people conversing are quite aware they're doing so in public. What would be "disrespectful" is if Facebook told you what your friends were saying in private messages between each other.

nashashmi 7y ago
He is calling privacy the things that are hidden by obscurity. Meaning that if you have a sign on your door advertising sneakers for example, that is private to only those people who visit your door. Sure it may be out in the open, but you didnt open it to all people.
- csallen 7y ago
  Totally, but a door is not a social network. A door is a fixed location. A social network is more like a magical bulletin board that tries to make itself as visible to as many people as possible. Perhaps you don't like that the bulletin board does that, but it's not rude. You're 100% free to not make posts there. I recommend it, in fact.
  - tru3_power 7y ago
    Yea but what if your profile is private? Wouldn’t you think that there still would be a level of privacy expectations that should be retained because only people you explicitly choose to share information with can see it? Why do corporations/advertisement get to bypass these constraints?
    - csallen 7y ago
      I may or may not agree… I'm not sure exactly what situation you're referring to. In the original article linked above, the situation was that users expected their social information to remain private to the ~100 friends they shared it with, and sued Facebook because it ended up in the hands of Cambridge Analytica. Facebook's attorney's counterpoint is that when you share information with friends, you give up any expectation of privacy as it pertains to these friends. And in this particular case, it was the friends who shared that information with some Facebook app by Kogan(sp?), who then shared it with Cambrige Analytica. I find the argument pretty convincing, actually. If you tell your friend a secret, and they tell someone else, even if it's a corporation, then that's that. If you share your Spotify playlist with a friend, and in turn they give up all their friends' playlists data (including yours) to some app, then imo that's kind of on you for sharing. The situation I disagree with is if you tell your friend a secret, and then the communication platform that you used to share that secret (your phone company, the hotel you're staying in, Gmail, Facebook, whatever) decides to share it with third parties.
annadane 7y ago
You know that button on FB called "share"? If I wanted someone to see something I'd press that or manually copy it into my status update. I don't want FB making the decisions for me and they've received feedback for it on their forums and refuse to fix it
- csallen 7y ago
  We will just have to agree to disagree here, I suppose. The way I see it, it's Facebook's platform, and it's up to them to build features as they see fit. The news feed works how the news feed works. There's nothing to "fix," and there's nothing rude about it. It's just an optional feature on a website on the Internet, and of course you don't have to use it if you don't like it.
  - annadane 7y ago
    When FB essentially becomes the internet, they need to be receptive to the needs of their users. It's not informed consent to have features like that.
vipref 7y ago
> people conversing are quite aware This is not true
- javagram 7y ago
  I doubt many people who use facebook don’t understand that they can see in the Newsfeed posts that weren’t addressed directly to them by their friends. That is the entire point of the Newsfeed. It was a big change when Facebook introduced the newsfeed back in 2006 or 2007 and I do remember people calling it the ‘stalker feed’ and there being a big facebook group with a million members asking for it to be removed. But people got over it, liked it, and instead of moving to myspace or one of the many alternative social networks stuck with facebook and facebook just got bigger and bigger thanks to users loving it.
  - lostmsu 7y ago
    I don't know about "liked it". "Did not stop using FB due to need to scroll through unrelated posts" would be a better description of what happened. We are just fortunate enough to be able to fix this problem for ourselves using a browser extension. Others just complain.
    - javagram 7y ago
      I don't know. At the time the Newsfeed was introduced (September 2006), Facebook was not the juggernaut it was today. There were other countries with social networks that had much stronger network effects locally (e.g. Orkut). Facebook only opened membership to non-college or high school students in Sept 2006 in fact - so if we had wanted to jump ship because of the 'stalker feed', there were still plenty of other options (e.g. MySpace) and the chance for a disruptor to launch if the other options weren't suitable. In practice, users chose to join Facebook and grow it to what we know it as now.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

underwater 7y ago

What are you trying to achieve by allowing someone to see a fact, but not actively surfacing that information? Within the scope of X likes Y, X said Z, Facebook has a very consistent and strong privacy model [1]. However, they have long considered anything that isn't a hard privacy violation of their rules to be fair game. Technically (and this is FB's engineering mindset showing through) not surfacing information is security through obscurity. It seems like they are backing away from that model, by deprecating features like Graph Search. I personally think that this is worse because it makes it much harder for people to understand what is visible to others. It muddies the rule of "if you don't want people to know something, don't put it on Facebook". [1] There are some messier areas, like People You May Know, or when platform apps are allowed to access (and store) all they data that a person who uses that app could see.

michannne 7y ago

Think of it like an echo. If your friend shouts at someone in the real world when others are around, you wouldn't be able to hear it from a mile away, but eventually you will hear about the fact they did so, either through gossip or some other means. Facebook cuts that extraneous fluff out and just tells you what they said. It is far from a violation of privacy, as you would be able to find that information easily if you went out looking for it in the first place. Especially in the world of health, there is a clear distinction about what is private, public, and confidential/secret. This case very clearly public.