Jeff Jarvis on Why Facebook's Latest Moves Really Make Us So Mad | Hacker News Reader

Jeff Jarvis on Why Facebook's Latest Moves Really Make Us So Mad

thefastertimes.com

10 pointsdreambird8 comments

I think he never really addresses the issue of why the reaction was so strong.

In my mind, it's two things: first, it retrospectively changed the rules. Facebook gave us one "contract" at the start and then after people were sufficiently invested in the platform, it changed the rules when it was very hard for them to leave. People see this as a breaking of the core pact of trust that you have with an online service when you sign up. We instinctively react to punish a company that does that, because our whole digital lives rely on the integrity of companies not to do such things.

The second thing is that the changes seem deliberately targeted to take advantage of people who are technologically "vulnerable" - those whose understanding of technology is limited. The people being exploited here are your mother, your children, your friends without great technological sophistication. These are the people who will be totally incapable of understanding and revising their settings. Most likely many of them are right now publishing photos and other content for the whole world to see without any idea they are doing that. This comes across as outright evil to me which is where much of my angst against Facebook comes from.

On the other hand, it might only take one bad experience (say an ex responding to a picture) for them to never use Facebook again. And then the word will spread. The techies are leaving the ship now, my guess is that in two or three years Oprah will delete her account on live TV.

I think it's because Facebook opened a "backdoor" to our information. Let's say I have my employer listed on my profile and my profile set to friends only. If Joe Random goes to my page, it's private, all good. But if the same person goes to my employer's public page, then they'll see my name listed there.

Now you might say, what's the problem, they'd already have to know to find you there. But what if they're just speculatively looking for someone from that company for a social engineering attack? Or worse, a real-world attack, for anyone who works for any "controversial" company - say an energy company, or a bank, or in pharma, or... Well there'll be someone with a grievance against them, no matter what it is.

That's why I've deleted all of that now, which a) makes FB less useful for me and b) makes me a less valuable set of eyeballs to show ads to. It's lose-lose. And even my non-tech friends are cottoning onto this - everyone knows that you can Google someone, this is only different because there's no single interface to search it... Yet.

I still think the whole issue is overblown and doesn't really resonate with people who may not have any strong expectation of privacy. Most of my FB friends seem to use the site almost exclusively to inform me of what they're eating for dinner. Do they care if that information isn't private? Even if we work under the only my friends can see it assumption that doesn't explain why someone I met once for 10 minutes wants to be my Facebook friend and share this information with me. I'm also convinced the presence of Moms and Dads on Facebook will be the real privacy revolution of Facebook. Aren't we going to be more careful about sharing embarrassing information if we know Mom & Dad will be seeing it? I guess my point is don't expect mass account cancelations. Most people will react by learning to self-censor and be more careful with their private information.

I totally agree. To me, Facebook is a very useful tool. Now that I am aware of the privacy deficiencies, I will just be more careful about what I say.

The same thing happened to me on twitter. I realized that my little tweets started giving me an online persona that was far more skewed and public than I initially expected, so I stopped tweeting. Now I only tweet to announce something or congratulate someone.

Great article, but the following line pretty much explained the contention with Facebook exactly for what it is:

They confused sharing with publishing.

Part of what annoys me about Facebook is that it assumes I mean all information I share to be shared with everyone -- either everyone on my friends list, or everyone on the whole Internet. There seems to be no conception of stuff I want to share only with a specific circle of friends.

In this article's terminology, Facebook only understands "public public" and "friends public". What about "family public", "coworkers public", or "inner circle public"? It seems to me it would be a far more useful service if it allowed for finer granularity in those choices, rather than pushing toward a ubiquitous "public public" only.

you can make arbitrary friend lists and share most things specifically to a list.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com