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As an avid FB/Twitter/Instagram/everything user, privacy is not a hard problem to deal with: if you put something on the internet, assume that everyone will see

by daeken 14y ago

As an avid FB/Twitter/Instagram/everything user, privacy is not a hard problem to deal with: if you put something on the internet, assume that everyone will see it and know it's you. It's as simple as that. This applies to your job search, family photos, embarrassing music, nude photos, and just about anything else. If you don't want it to be seen by the world, don't share it. At the end of the day, your privacy is your responsibility.

tsieling 14y ago
That's an easy if weak way to deal with a human reality and the failures of tech design to accommodate it. How does it work for information about me that other people gather? Like medical records? Is that my responsibility as well?
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- stephengillie 14y ago
  How does it work for information about me that other people gather? Like medical records? Is that my responsibility as well? Or camera phone video of you doing something totally legal, like badmouthing 47% of the country to your friends at a dinner.
- res0nat0r 14y ago
  That isn't a technology problem, it is a people problem.
  - 001sky 14y ago
    That isn't a technology problem, it is a people problem == & That's why we cant have nice things
ryusage 14y ago
So you just set everything on facebook, etc. to be public? I guess that's one approach. Personally, I'm always aware there is a risk that the things I put online will be publicly exposed at some point, but I treat it like any other risk: I evaluate the likelihood that it will happen, and make decisions from there. I don't think that risk can ever be zero, but there are ways to make it smaller, and I think that's the perspective most people are coming from.
- enneff 14y ago
  I don't set everything to public, but I assume that anything I put onto the internet will be available to anyone who wants it, forever. It's the only sane way to use this technology.
- cbr 14y ago
  I do set everything on Facebook to be public. That way I don't need to worry about the inevitable bugs and misfeatures that make things public when you think they aren't.
saraid216 14y ago
How to deal with privacy: pretend it doesn't exist.
icesoldier 14y ago
Fair enough, but what about other people's actiona regarding you? I might not say a thing about that sweet party I was at the other night, but what if my friend snaps a photo and tags me, like in the story here? I haven't delved into the settings in a while, but I think there should be an option to manually approve any tags made of you. That way there's some degree of control over friends who excessively document everything.
- DanBC 14y ago
  > but I think there should be an option to manually approve any tags made of you. There is.
cryptoz 14y ago
That is completely false. You do not control your privacy on the internet. You can choose to never have an email account, never sign up for any social networking site, etc, and these companies will still build a profile for you and collect tagged pictures of you and learn as much as they can about you. Privacy on the internet is definitely a hard problem. Don't dismiss it because you have a simplistic perspective and trust other companies to understand that you don't want to have a presence on the internet. They don't care.
blhack 14y ago
Wow I hate this view of the future. My family photo albums are for the people in my living room to see. I really want the digital equivalents of them to be the same, and feel like pushing the paradigm in that direction is valuable. This "well the future just sucks, DEAL WITH IT!" mentality that I see parroted here on HN so often is disgusting. Online is broken. Let's fix it, and let's champion anybody else who is trying to fix it.
- pacala 14y ago
  It's even broken in trivial ways. Sure, sharing a pic with one's friends raises the risk of someone sharing it on Twitter, but that is super simple to do. Right click, Save Image As..., Upload, Browse, OK. Here are 2 little technical things to do: * Make the browser technology slightly less happy to assume that displaying a picture means that the viewer has all the rights to download it for his/hers own use. Take out "Save Image As...", perhaps if a "private" attribute is set on the image. * Make Facebook technology display more clearly what is the audience of a given item. Yeah, that means spelling in clear if the image is available for advertisers as well. Given this little two steps, "accidentally" posting a private image to Twitter becomes less of an excuse. You took the action of taking a screen snapshot (or camera pic) of something explicitly labeled as private and posted it for a public audience. That sucks and may be even be grounds for legal action under copyright law.
mtgx 14y ago
I think a better solution for controlling privacy on the Internet is - not using the Internet. And by that I mean that it seems very hard to make anything private on the Internet, and it's becoming increasingly harder, instead of easier. I think there's opportunity here for start-ups to solve this problem to allow you to better control privacy on the Internet. And when I say controlling privacy on the Internet, I mean keeping it private from the company itself, the users you don't want to share with, and government, too.
__--__ 14y ago
What about other people posting photos of you? The problem becomes a lot harder when everybody is posting photos of everybody else. It gets even harder if they do so in a malicious manner. e.g. ex-boyfriend posting naked photos of you that you didn't know he had. old frenemies posting photos they took of you and tagging it with 'cheating bitch'. etc.
subsection1h 14y ago
if you put something on the internet, assume that everyone will see it and know it's you. It's as simple as that. So if I submit my credit card information to Amazon, which is part of the Internet, I should assume that everyone will see my credit card information? It's as simple as that? That's good to know. Thanks for your help.

by daeken 14y ago

tsieling 14y ago

That's an easy if weak way to deal with a human reality and the failures of tech design to accommodate it. How does it work for information about me that other people gather? Like medical records? Is that my responsibility as well?

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
stephengillie 14y ago
How does it work for information about me that other people gather? Like medical records? Is that my responsibility as well? Or camera phone video of you doing something totally legal, like badmouthing 47% of the country to your friends at a dinner.
res0nat0r 14y ago
That isn't a technology problem, it is a people problem.
- 001sky 14y ago
  That isn't a technology problem, it is a people problem == & That's why we cant have nice things

ryusage 14y ago

So you just set everything on facebook, etc. to be public? I guess that's one approach. Personally, I'm always aware there is a risk that the things I put online will be publicly exposed at some point, but I treat it like any other risk: I evaluate the likelihood that it will happen, and make decisions from there. I don't think that risk can ever be zero, but there are ways to make it smaller, and I think that's the perspective most people are coming from.

enneff 14y ago
I don't set everything to public, but I assume that anything I put onto the internet will be available to anyone who wants it, forever. It's the only sane way to use this technology.
cbr 14y ago
I do set everything on Facebook to be public. That way I don't need to worry about the inevitable bugs and misfeatures that make things public when you think they aren't.

saraid216 14y ago

How to deal with privacy: pretend it doesn't exist.

icesoldier 14y ago

Fair enough, but what about other people's actiona regarding you? I might not say a thing about that sweet party I was at the other night, but what if my friend snaps a photo and tags me, like in the story here? I haven't delved into the settings in a while, but I think there should be an option to manually approve any tags made of you. That way there's some degree of control over friends who excessively document everything.

DanBC 14y ago
> but I think there should be an option to manually approve any tags made of you. There is.

cryptoz 14y ago

That is completely false. You do not control your privacy on the internet. You can choose to never have an email account, never sign up for any social networking site, etc, and these companies will still build a profile for you and collect tagged pictures of you and learn as much as they can about you. Privacy on the internet is definitely a hard problem. Don't dismiss it because you have a simplistic perspective and trust other companies to understand that you don't want to have a presence on the internet. They don't care.

blhack 14y ago

Wow I hate this view of the future. My family photo albums are for the people in my living room to see. I really want the digital equivalents of them to be the same, and feel like pushing the paradigm in that direction is valuable. This "well the future just sucks, DEAL WITH IT!" mentality that I see parroted here on HN so often is disgusting. Online is broken. Let's fix it, and let's champion anybody else who is trying to fix it.

pacala 14y ago
It's even broken in trivial ways. Sure, sharing a pic with one's friends raises the risk of someone sharing it on Twitter, but that is super simple to do. Right click, Save Image As..., Upload, Browse, OK. Here are 2 little technical things to do: * Make the browser technology slightly less happy to assume that displaying a picture means that the viewer has all the rights to download it for his/hers own use. Take out "Save Image As...", perhaps if a "private" attribute is set on the image. * Make Facebook technology display more clearly what is the audience of a given item. Yeah, that means spelling in clear if the image is available for advertisers as well. Given this little two steps, "accidentally" posting a private image to Twitter becomes less of an excuse. You took the action of taking a screen snapshot (or camera pic) of something explicitly labeled as private and posted it for a public audience. That sucks and may be even be grounds for legal action under copyright law.

mtgx 14y ago

I think a better solution for controlling privacy on the Internet is - not using the Internet. And by that I mean that it seems very hard to make anything private on the Internet, and it's becoming increasingly harder, instead of easier. I think there's opportunity here for start-ups to solve this problem to allow you to better control privacy on the Internet. And when I say controlling privacy on the Internet, I mean keeping it private from the company itself, the users you don't want to share with, and government, too.

__--__ 14y ago

What about other people posting photos of you? The problem becomes a lot harder when everybody is posting photos of everybody else. It gets even harder if they do so in a malicious manner. e.g. ex-boyfriend posting naked photos of you that you didn't know he had. old frenemies posting photos they took of you and tagging it with 'cheating bitch'. etc.

subsection1h 14y ago

if you put something on the internet, assume that everyone will see it and know it's you. It's as simple as that. So if I submit my credit card information to Amazon, which is part of the Internet, I should assume that everyone will see my credit card information? It's as simple as that? That's good to know. Thanks for your help.