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The process was misleading. The default selection was based on users' previous settings only if they had changed them in the past, and as Facebook has pointed

The process was misleading. The default selection was based on users' previous settings only if they had changed them in the past, and as Facebook has pointed out, only 20% of people have done so. That forces the rest of users to make a choice that most neither understand nor want to make. People see Facebook as a way to privately share their life with friends. That's the foundation on which Facebook was built - that's the core aspect that convinced people to abandon other social networks for FB - and now they are idiotically abandoning that core principal and needlessly exposing their users. Personally, as a web app developer, I'm confused about the process myself. The privacy dialog seemed to suggest that no matter what my settings are, my name, profile picture, and friends list will be public to all. If I'm being given more choice about my privacy, why is this choice being taken away from me? Until this point, I had the choice of being pretty much invisible from anyone but my friends. Back when people used Myspace, it was quite open by default as well. The difference is that on Myspace your name could be Donald Duck, your location could be set to Antarctica and nobody cared. You could invent your own privacy controls where they didn't exist. Try doing something that on Facebook and your account will be instantly suspended. This is not about users being dumb or not. Many intelligent people don't know (or care to know) the intricate details of web apps.

indigoviolet 17y ago
Time will prove you right or wrong, but I believe that people will in general adapt to the way the web changes. I think it's a challenge to educate users so that you can have a featureful app without causing them harm, but I don't think it's impossible. The web populace has grown vastly more informed in just the last five years- why should we decide they won't be able to grasp this extra control? Facebook is ambitious; it wants to be a lot of things. It wants to continue to be the service where you talk only to your friends, but it also wants to be other things. We believe we can do other things as well as we've done friend-only social networking. That may be a misjudgement, we'll find out. Re: your friend list: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=197943902130 http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=197943902130 Re: The other settings that became publicly available- I think it was a call they made, balancing what is good for the network and what is reasonable for the individual on a social networking site. Some of it had to do with what privacy was feasible to enforce (given that you had to have Search on the site, and different levels of indexing etc), and I don't necessarily know all the details here. The primary goal was to /simplify/ privacy settings, and make it more fine-grained, which they've clearly done.
- gaius 17y ago
  The other settings that became publicly available- I think it was a call they made, balancing what is good for the network and what is reasonable for the individual on a social networking site. Who your friends are and what groups you are a member of is potentially consequential information. This was the fatal flaw in Livejournal's privacy system. Sure you could make your journal entries friends-only but your profile - your friends list, your interests, your groups and your profile pictures - were always public. If you were involved in anything that you maybe didn't want your current/future employer/cow-orkers (say) to know about, the ONLY safeguard was to keep your username a secret. Well on Facebook, you're supposed to use your real name...
teeja 17y ago
"People see Facebook as a way to privately share their life with friends." Fits what people in my family think (I'm not a user). I haven't thought it was a good choice for that, because huge sites tend to attract hacks. If private sharing is the reason most people go there, then I'd think FB would want the UI for privacy to be very transparent (at the "here's what happens when you click this, and here's what non-friends will see" level). Twitter's UI surprised me. I used the 'public' setting; as their docs described it, I expected @someone messages would be seen only by people following me -and- the recipient. Wrong. When I googled my t-name, all my tweets, including those @ messages, were wide open to the whole net. Whoa!
- Raphael 17y ago
  You have to remember that Twitter is dumb. "@" is just a character. (But "d" makes it private.)

indigoviolet 17y ago

Time will prove you right or wrong, but I believe that people will in general adapt to the way the web changes. I think it's a challenge to educate users so that you can have a featureful app without causing them harm, but I don't think it's impossible. The web populace has grown vastly more informed in just the last five years- why should we decide they won't be able to grasp this extra control? Facebook is ambitious; it wants to be a lot of things. It wants to continue to be the service where you talk only to your friends, but it also wants to be other things. We believe we can do other things as well as we've done friend-only social networking. That may be a misjudgement, we'll find out. Re: your friend list: http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=197943902130 http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=197943902130 Re: The other settings that became publicly available- I think it was a call they made, balancing what is good for the network and what is reasonable for the individual on a social networking site. Some of it had to do with what privacy was feasible to enforce (given that you had to have Search on the site, and different levels of indexing etc), and I don't necessarily know all the details here. The primary goal was to /simplify/ privacy settings, and make it more fine-grained, which they've clearly done.

gaius 17y ago
The other settings that became publicly available- I think it was a call they made, balancing what is good for the network and what is reasonable for the individual on a social networking site. Who your friends are and what groups you are a member of is potentially consequential information. This was the fatal flaw in Livejournal's privacy system. Sure you could make your journal entries friends-only but your profile - your friends list, your interests, your groups and your profile pictures - were always public. If you were involved in anything that you maybe didn't want your current/future employer/cow-orkers (say) to know about, the ONLY safeguard was to keep your username a secret. Well on Facebook, you're supposed to use your real name...

teeja 17y ago

"People see Facebook as a way to privately share their life with friends." Fits what people in my family think (I'm not a user). I haven't thought it was a good choice for that, because huge sites tend to attract hacks. If private sharing is the reason most people go there, then I'd think FB would want the UI for privacy to be very transparent (at the "here's what happens when you click this, and here's what non-friends will see" level). Twitter's UI surprised me. I used the 'public' setting; as their docs described it, I expected @someone messages would be seen only by people following me -and- the recipient. Wrong. When I googled my t-name, all my tweets, including those @ messages, were wide open to the whole net. Whoa!

Raphael 17y ago
You have to remember that Twitter is dumb. "@" is just a character. (But "d" makes it private.)