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I think there is an interesting gray area here actually that I haven't seen discussed. Randi posted the picture as "friends only" but due to Facebook's policie
by rweba 14y ago
I think there is an interesting gray area here actually that I haven't seen discussed.
Randi posted the picture as "friends only" but due to Facebook's policies it turns out that people other than those friends could see the picture.
First question: If a friend posts something as "friends only" are you ethically bound not to publicly share it? I think most people would answer YES, under the assumption that if they wanted to make it public they would have posted it publicly.
But there are a couple of interesting wrinkles here :
1. Facebook's interface did not make it clear to Callie that this was a "friends only" post. Because it showed up in her feed she assumed it was public and meant for public consumption.
2. The presence of Mark Zuckerberg in the picture. Zuckerberg is essentially a celebrity and it seems there is a widespread assumption that ANY picture with a celebrity in it (whether Justin Bieber or President Obama) is fair game for sharing in a way that does not apply to non celebrities. I think if the picture did not include Mark Zuckerberg it is far less likely Callie or anyone else would have thought it was appropriate to share it.
- loceng 14y agoIf you want someone to not share something, you show them in person - on your own computer - without giving them access to a digital copy.
- ynniv 14y agoGoogle Glass will fix that.
- arrrg 14y agoI don't think it's too much to ask for someone to be polite and decent.
- loceng 14y agoIndeed, yet they didn't ask - it was assumed. Both parties assumed. Equally so it's not too much to ask for someone to state how private or public an image or piece of information is. This is really why it's up to the individual to keep things private when they truly want them to be. There is no real thing called privacy. And human behaviour on average dictates that a) people make mistakes and could share things they might not mean to, and b) that many people, the less close they are to you the more so, that will not think about being able to easily share something (perhaps unless expressly stated otherwise in that moment).
- rhizome 14y ago"Good fences make good neighbors," and privacy permissions are the fences of FB.
- subsection1h 14y agoI keep asking Jeff Bezos to visit me so I can show him my credit card information in person, but he continues to ignore me. :-(
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- rhizome 14y agoIt's not a gray area at all. As has been asserted many, many times in the past, if you're not paying for a service, you're the product. In this light, a product bears no ethical responsibility to its manufacturer. It would be quite insane for a company to blame one of its products for being faulty. "Don't look at us, it's the product that killed those people." This is just products acting the way they do. Per #1, it's not our responsibility to divine (or even respect) what the real meaning of "Friends Only" is. #2 is irrelevant, if the subject matter wasn't as it is, a (minor) celebrity wouldn't be bringing the Streisand down on it. People reshare all the time, and in fact there are pages on FB entirely dedicated to the phenomenon that enjoy hundreds of thousands of reshares for their posts.