7 ms·

Facebook enters the age of accidental oversharing

54 points by iProject 14y ago

coopdog 14y ago
Hell yes, stay off the wall. That's the reason most people don't use Facebook login, they're scared it will put something on their wall. If Facebook had any sense they'd force the API to ask permission and show the user what will be posted before it will do so. Maybe then people would be more likely to use Facebook login and give them that network effect advantage they're after.
- slig 14y ago
  > That's the reason most people don't use Facebook login, they're scared it will put something on their wall. You and your tech savvy friends are not "most people". Most people don't know and don't care.
  - smoyer 14y ago
    But they do care when they're wall contains things they didn't plan to share. Curiously, I've seen this a lot with G+ and Picasa.
jnorthrop 14y ago
From the article: "Oliver Cameron, founder of a private social network called Everyme, says most of the responsibility lies with developers. 'The apps that are implementing this could do a better job,' he says. 'The average Facebook user has no clue what they're sharing.' I couldn't agree more with this sentiment. If we, the startup community, can't figure out a way of being transparent about our intentions with user's personal information in a way that makes sense to them, we will suffer a backlash. We risk facing a cultural shift where it becomes hip to "drop out" of a social online society. This has already started to some extent as people become more aware of the risks of oversharing (as pointed out in the article) but it could quickly become more pervasive.
- unimpressive 14y ago
  > We risk facing a cultural shift where it becomes hip to "drop out" of a social online society. And? While this might scare the sizable portion of HN readers who have money staked on social, I would see this as a net positive. EDIT: No but really, besides the Arab Spring social media has spammed the world with cute cat pictures and eaten away at the blogosphere. The portions eaten away are subsumed into one of the competing walled gardens. The web wasn't designed to be an echo chamber.
  - smoyer 14y ago
    I'm not sure why this was down-voted ... isn't "dropping out" just the extreme version of reduced usage? There was an article posted last week that described users as being tired of FB and that there was a 30% drop in engagement (I'll link later if I can find it).
- slig 14y ago
  I disagree. The whole point of facebook apps is to spam and spread. If your shinny fb app doesn't post actions, then what's the point of building it on top of fb? Every other (successful) app is going to spam. FB shouldn't allow that in the first place.
mtgx 14y ago
Maybe this is the only way Mark Zuckerberg can keep his "Zuck Law" alive (sharing doubling every year), by forcing everyone's accounts to share more and more.
phwd 14y ago
This is partly the fault of the user (yes, there is a dialog that says what exactly is going to happen, so the ignorance is there no matter how much you think the user is clueless) and mostly the fault of Facebook partners. Facebook partners and web companies with close relationships with Facebook get access to the Open Graph actions first (Spotify was in this group). Thus, less experienced developers and lesser known companies follow the path these companies take and believe that this is how the Open Graph should be. There are many questions on Stack Overflow or the Facebook developers group from people inexperienced asking how to make articles automatically read when users arrive at their site (the news.read action).
- andrewcross 14y ago
  It says that they are requesting the ability to share to your wall, yes, but most of our previous experiences have taught us that this means we will have an OPTION to do that in the app, not that it will do it automatically without you ever knowing.
redwood 14y ago
Not just this... Facebook's BASE privacy settings for basic sharing on wall posts/timeline etc are extremely counter-intuitive. My girlfriend recently discovered that professional contacts here in a foreign country could look her up on F'book from behind their desks and see pictures from her college days during their meeting. Should she have turned her photos private earlier on? YES Did Facebook give her any indication they were so open? NO. In fact Facebook changed their settings numerous times and each time left different defaults. Now she had to go through and make numerous settings changes, and each time she didn't really know how things looked to a non-friend logged into Facebook. Ultimately I think she had to manually make EVERY album private to friends only. Seriously if I wasn't so locked into Facebook I would be so out of there. Bastards have really abused our trust.
andrewcross 14y ago
It's completely up to the developers here. You have to know that you are breaking the trust of your users for a spike in traffic. As an example, I no longer use Socialcam or Viddy after they defaulted to "frictionless sharing". They got a really nice spike from it, but it cost them my trust.
grandalf 14y ago
Facebook had discovered a very sweet blind spot in the human social awareness system. One person posts a picture and a friend comments on it, then mutual friends (such as those who are oddly curious about the poster of the picture or someone in it) can take a quick glimpse at that person's life. This is rewarded by the brain with a small shot of dopamine. This is a function not of the social graph itself (friend) but of the addictive nature of the fleeting glimpses it allows people to have of others. Suppose you have 500 friends who each have several hundred friends. Some subset of those friends constitutes your "fascination graph". Maybe you think they are hot, maybe you aspire to their lifestyle, maybe you hated them in high school, etc. etc. In order to continue to succeed, Facebook (and app makers) have to realize that it's not the mundane behaviors of your Facebook friends that are interesting... it's the allure of those on the fascination graph that generates the dopamine and the slot machine-addict kind of clicking that is gold to advertisers. Facebook has managed to deliver this dopamine in a way that's not creepy (nobody has to go through anyone's garbage, etc.) so the question is, is it ever going to start to seem creepy?
- cheatercheater 14y ago
  You have 500 friends? I have 4 friends. Are we talking about different things? I think you mean 500 "contacts".
  - phwd 14y ago
    500 friends inclusive of acquaintances, co-workers, relatives, classmates from high school, classmates from university. It makes no sense being all semantic about it; Facebook "friends" are different from what a person would call a friend in reality, hence the new categorization, subscriptions and smart list options given.
    - cheatercheater 14y ago
      That's exactly the kind of response I wanted to achieve. > It makes no sense being all semantic about it Does it really not? Look, you're commenting on an article which states that Facebook leaks our privacy. Don't you happen to notice that it does so because everyone is considered a friend? This ambiguity and lack of precision in defining the personal relationship to people you are in contact with, coupled with simply assuming by default that everyone's your trusted friend and can be given access to the most private details of your life is exactly what causes "privacy leaks". It's a social mechanism, and granted - if every user were to set up his privacy options in the perfect way - they wouldn't be happening. But we're only human, and on many levels, some of them subconscious, it's difficult for us to keep in mind that a friend may, in fact, not be a friend.
crazygringo 14y ago
My biggest problem is that, last I checked, I don't have the option to prevent a Facebook app from auto-sharing things at the moment of installing it. Instead, I have to agree to install it, then go to my privacy settings, then remove its permission to auto-share. Nowadays I just refuse to install apps.
- nekgrim 14y ago
  Publishing on the user stream is, afaik, an extended permission. Facebook asks (for Timeline users) if you want to give the application these supplementary permissions, and you can disable these one by one. But the application will ask for these permissions every time you use it. I blocked Deezer from sharing my music, and the website pop a little message every time i launch a song, asking "Do you want to share on your timeline" Source : http://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/permissions/#extended_perms http://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/permissio...
  - freehunter 14y ago
    I do know (personal experience) that some applications refuse to work properly if you don't grant them every bit of access they request. Even if that access is not fundamental to the operation of the application. The example I speak of is Digsby. I saw some of my friends had postings from Digsby on their wall, with "achievements" like sending 100,000 messages etc. I didn't want that, so when I installed Digsby I unchecked that option. Consequence: Digsby would randomly boot me out of Facebook Chat and not allow me to log back in. I had to remove it from my Facebook apps list, re-login, and turn off wall postings within the Digsby app itself rather than Facebook's permission management. That's the kind of thing that irritates me.
- brokenrhino 14y ago
  When it asks for permision there is a spot for who can see the posts. I always choose "Only Me" and I deselect the post to timeline request as much as possible.
- AJ007 14y ago
  This is how I solved Facebook's over sharing problem: I don't use Facebook apps. If I need to, such as for business, I run it through a dummy account. Had Facebook taken the path of not fucking around with privacy settings, I might be more open to Facebook's apps. However their intentions are clear, given events such as: automatically opting in to new email alerts even through I've disabled all other Facebook e-mail alerts, continually changing the privacy settings page resulting in the removal of past privacy options, allowing "friends" to add me to groups I wish to be no part of, un-hiding comments to my page which I have marked as either spam or offensive, and so on. The end result is a Facebook which I use to look at photos and tell girls to Skype me and not much else. While I may notice these things right as they happen, for other non-technical users their happiness with Facebook slowly erodes away and they can't quite pin point it. As Facebook continues to add more and more "noise", the chances of a competitor being able to beat Facebook at their own game increases. While the analogy may be overused, albeit in a different manner, Google was able to beat Yahoo not only because it was a better search engine but because it had a lot less noise. While Facebook appears to be the Google of social networking, the sheer amount of "noise" in my news feed tells me otherwise. (A note for users of both Facebook, Twitter, bloggers, etc: the amount of "noise" you produce is directly relational to how much people whose ideas matter pay attention to you. The friends who are over sharing get blocked from my Facebook news feed. The Twitter users that tweet about their cat grooming habits are un-followed. And so on. I am extremely cautious what gets posted to my feed, and when it does, people remember what I posted.)
trustfundbaby 14y ago
It isn't accidental, Facebook chooses defaults that work for facebook ... not for the user. This causes people not to trust facebook, and because of that they're going to find it more and more difficult to monetize user behavior on the site. They've been trying to sell users on sharing everything, but people want to share things on their own terms. Google understood (hopefully they still do) this, facebook doesn't. How can they do really great things with user data when the default attitude of their users is "I don't trust them with my data"? ... its a trick question ... they can't. There's a reason why they say "You can shear a sheep many times, but you can only skin it once". Will be fun to watch them try though.
brokentone 14y ago
Agree with the message of the article, but I feel as though it's a little out of date. Frictionless sharing isn't new, Facebook isn't "entering" this issue.
yuhong 14y ago
Personally, I have been thinking that the illusion that people are perfect is flawed for a while now.

54 points by iProject 14y ago

Hell yes, stay off the wall. That's the reason most people don't use Facebook login, they're scared it will put something on their wall. If Facebook had any sense they'd force the API to ask permission and show the user what will be posted before it will do so. Maybe then people would be more likely to use Facebook login and give them that network effect advantage they're after.

slig 14y ago
> That's the reason most people don't use Facebook login, they're scared it will put something on their wall. You and your tech savvy friends are not "most people". Most people don't know and don't care.
- smoyer 14y ago
  But they do care when they're wall contains things they didn't plan to share. Curiously, I've seen this a lot with G+ and Picasa.

jnorthrop 14y ago

From the article: "Oliver Cameron, founder of a private social network called Everyme, says most of the responsibility lies with developers. 'The apps that are implementing this could do a better job,' he says. 'The average Facebook user has no clue what they're sharing.' I couldn't agree more with this sentiment. If we, the startup community, can't figure out a way of being transparent about our intentions with user's personal information in a way that makes sense to them, we will suffer a backlash. We risk facing a cultural shift where it becomes hip to "drop out" of a social online society. This has already started to some extent as people become more aware of the risks of oversharing (as pointed out in the article) but it could quickly become more pervasive.

unimpressive 14y ago
> We risk facing a cultural shift where it becomes hip to "drop out" of a social online society. And? While this might scare the sizable portion of HN readers who have money staked on social, I would see this as a net positive. EDIT: No but really, besides the Arab Spring social media has spammed the world with cute cat pictures and eaten away at the blogosphere. The portions eaten away are subsumed into one of the competing walled gardens. The web wasn't designed to be an echo chamber.
- smoyer 14y ago
  I'm not sure why this was down-voted ... isn't "dropping out" just the extreme version of reduced usage? There was an article posted last week that described users as being tired of FB and that there was a 30% drop in engagement (I'll link later if I can find it).
slig 14y ago
I disagree. The whole point of facebook apps is to spam and spread. If your shinny fb app doesn't post actions, then what's the point of building it on top of fb? Every other (successful) app is going to spam. FB shouldn't allow that in the first place.

mtgx 14y ago

Maybe this is the only way Mark Zuckerberg can keep his "Zuck Law" alive (sharing doubling every year), by forcing everyone's accounts to share more and more.

phwd 14y ago

This is partly the fault of the user (yes, there is a dialog that says what exactly is going to happen, so the ignorance is there no matter how much you think the user is clueless) and mostly the fault of Facebook partners. Facebook partners and web companies with close relationships with Facebook get access to the Open Graph actions first (Spotify was in this group). Thus, less experienced developers and lesser known companies follow the path these companies take and believe that this is how the Open Graph should be. There are many questions on Stack Overflow or the Facebook developers group from people inexperienced asking how to make articles automatically read when users arrive at their site (the news.read action).

andrewcross 14y ago
It says that they are requesting the ability to share to your wall, yes, but most of our previous experiences have taught us that this means we will have an OPTION to do that in the app, not that it will do it automatically without you ever knowing.

redwood 14y ago

Not just this... Facebook's BASE privacy settings for basic sharing on wall posts/timeline etc are extremely counter-intuitive. My girlfriend recently discovered that professional contacts here in a foreign country could look her up on F'book from behind their desks and see pictures from her college days during their meeting. Should she have turned her photos private earlier on? YES Did Facebook give her any indication they were so open? NO. In fact Facebook changed their settings numerous times and each time left different defaults. Now she had to go through and make numerous settings changes, and each time she didn't really know how things looked to a non-friend logged into Facebook. Ultimately I think she had to manually make EVERY album private to friends only. Seriously if I wasn't so locked into Facebook I would be so out of there. Bastards have really abused our trust.

andrewcross 14y ago

It's completely up to the developers here. You have to know that you are breaking the trust of your users for a spike in traffic. As an example, I no longer use Socialcam or Viddy after they defaulted to "frictionless sharing". They got a really nice spike from it, but it cost them my trust.

grandalf 14y ago

Facebook had discovered a very sweet blind spot in the human social awareness system. One person posts a picture and a friend comments on it, then mutual friends (such as those who are oddly curious about the poster of the picture or someone in it) can take a quick glimpse at that person's life. This is rewarded by the brain with a small shot of dopamine. This is a function not of the social graph itself (friend) but of the addictive nature of the fleeting glimpses it allows people to have of others. Suppose you have 500 friends who each have several hundred friends. Some subset of those friends constitutes your "fascination graph". Maybe you think they are hot, maybe you aspire to their lifestyle, maybe you hated them in high school, etc. etc. In order to continue to succeed, Facebook (and app makers) have to realize that it's not the mundane behaviors of your Facebook friends that are interesting... it's the allure of those on the fascination graph that generates the dopamine and the slot machine-addict kind of clicking that is gold to advertisers. Facebook has managed to deliver this dopamine in a way that's not creepy (nobody has to go through anyone's garbage, etc.) so the question is, is it ever going to start to seem creepy?

cheatercheater 14y ago
You have 500 friends? I have 4 friends. Are we talking about different things? I think you mean 500 "contacts".
- phwd 14y ago
  500 friends inclusive of acquaintances, co-workers, relatives, classmates from high school, classmates from university. It makes no sense being all semantic about it; Facebook "friends" are different from what a person would call a friend in reality, hence the new categorization, subscriptions and smart list options given.
  - cheatercheater 14y ago
    That's exactly the kind of response I wanted to achieve. > It makes no sense being all semantic about it Does it really not? Look, you're commenting on an article which states that Facebook leaks our privacy. Don't you happen to notice that it does so because everyone is considered a friend? This ambiguity and lack of precision in defining the personal relationship to people you are in contact with, coupled with simply assuming by default that everyone's your trusted friend and can be given access to the most private details of your life is exactly what causes "privacy leaks". It's a social mechanism, and granted - if every user were to set up his privacy options in the perfect way - they wouldn't be happening. But we're only human, and on many levels, some of them subconscious, it's difficult for us to keep in mind that a friend may, in fact, not be a friend.

crazygringo 14y ago

My biggest problem is that, last I checked, I don't have the option to prevent a Facebook app from auto-sharing things at the moment of installing it. Instead, I have to agree to install it, then go to my privacy settings, then remove its permission to auto-share. Nowadays I just refuse to install apps.

nekgrim 14y ago
Publishing on the user stream is, afaik, an extended permission. Facebook asks (for Timeline users) if you want to give the application these supplementary permissions, and you can disable these one by one. But the application will ask for these permissions every time you use it. I blocked Deezer from sharing my music, and the website pop a little message every time i launch a song, asking "Do you want to share on your timeline" Source : http://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/permissions/#extended_perms http://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/permissio...
- freehunter 14y ago
  I do know (personal experience) that some applications refuse to work properly if you don't grant them every bit of access they request. Even if that access is not fundamental to the operation of the application. The example I speak of is Digsby. I saw some of my friends had postings from Digsby on their wall, with "achievements" like sending 100,000 messages etc. I didn't want that, so when I installed Digsby I unchecked that option. Consequence: Digsby would randomly boot me out of Facebook Chat and not allow me to log back in. I had to remove it from my Facebook apps list, re-login, and turn off wall postings within the Digsby app itself rather than Facebook's permission management. That's the kind of thing that irritates me.
brokenrhino 14y ago
When it asks for permision there is a spot for who can see the posts. I always choose "Only Me" and I deselect the post to timeline request as much as possible.
AJ007 14y ago
This is how I solved Facebook's over sharing problem: I don't use Facebook apps. If I need to, such as for business, I run it through a dummy account. Had Facebook taken the path of not fucking around with privacy settings, I might be more open to Facebook's apps. However their intentions are clear, given events such as: automatically opting in to new email alerts even through I've disabled all other Facebook e-mail alerts, continually changing the privacy settings page resulting in the removal of past privacy options, allowing "friends" to add me to groups I wish to be no part of, un-hiding comments to my page which I have marked as either spam or offensive, and so on. The end result is a Facebook which I use to look at photos and tell girls to Skype me and not much else. While I may notice these things right as they happen, for other non-technical users their happiness with Facebook slowly erodes away and they can't quite pin point it. As Facebook continues to add more and more "noise", the chances of a competitor being able to beat Facebook at their own game increases. While the analogy may be overused, albeit in a different manner, Google was able to beat Yahoo not only because it was a better search engine but because it had a lot less noise. While Facebook appears to be the Google of social networking, the sheer amount of "noise" in my news feed tells me otherwise. (A note for users of both Facebook, Twitter, bloggers, etc: the amount of "noise" you produce is directly relational to how much people whose ideas matter pay attention to you. The friends who are over sharing get blocked from my Facebook news feed. The Twitter users that tweet about their cat grooming habits are un-followed. And so on. I am extremely cautious what gets posted to my feed, and when it does, people remember what I posted.)

trustfundbaby 14y ago

It isn't accidental, Facebook chooses defaults that work for facebook ... not for the user. This causes people not to trust facebook, and because of that they're going to find it more and more difficult to monetize user behavior on the site. They've been trying to sell users on sharing everything, but people want to share things on their own terms. Google understood (hopefully they still do) this, facebook doesn't. How can they do really great things with user data when the default attitude of their users is "I don't trust them with my data"? ... its a trick question ... they can't. There's a reason why they say "You can shear a sheep many times, but you can only skin it once". Will be fun to watch them try though.

brokentone 14y ago

Agree with the message of the article, but I feel as though it's a little out of date. Frictionless sharing isn't new, Facebook isn't "entering" this issue.

yuhong 14y ago

Personally, I have been thinking that the illusion that people are perfect is flawed for a while now.