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How is this different from Mr. Acosta tweeting "Welcome Ms. Duncan to the Queer Chorus!"? Sure, it was explicitly messaged to the father... but what if that twe
by btown 14y ago
How is this different from Mr. Acosta tweeting "Welcome Ms. Duncan to the Queer Chorus!"? Sure, it was explicitly messaged to the father... but what if that tweet had gone viral somehow, or otherwise found its way to the father?
Facebook is clearly wrong for making it unclear that group membership was publicly available information, that it is in essence a tweet of that information. But is it wrong for understating the fact that publicly available information can be publicly distributed to interested parties at any time? People need to know that this is the direction in which Facebook (and the Internet) is moving, and that they should just assume that anything they publicly post will be distributed to interested parties (of which the father surely counts). Sure, a lot of the blame falls on Facebook, but not all of it - if you don't want to be outed, tell your friends to make sure that anything they post about you is explicitly marked as a private share (which group membership is not).
- Semaphor 14y agoBecause you do not have a choice about being added to groups. The article talks about facebooks privacy settings but those are essentially fine. What's not is their completely fucked up group system. You can only opt out of groups but everyone / allowed members can add you to it. Even better, get added to a very active group and wake up to 700 notifications. I could create a FB group called "Gay hackernews users" and add you to it (provided I have you in my friendlist) and it would be published to your friends. You could leave it afterwards, but first you'd join and it'd be published.
- TWAndrews 14y agoIn that case it would just be Mr. Acosta being insensitive/inconsiderate. Twitter is understood to be public. Facebook is (wrongly) believed to be private to some degree.
- darkarmani 14y agoDon't apologize for Facebook's broken group mechanism. Everyone knows it is a broken model.