Hacker News Reader

Zuckerberg acknowledges that complex privacy controls are a problem. But I suspect that's only true because the defaults are evil. If users didn't have to worry about being deceived, they wouldn't complain about complex controls because they'd rarely use them.

Like simplicity, defaults are hugely important in UI design. But Zuckerberg appears to be carefully avoiding the subject.

View on HN

This. The granular privacy controls were a good thing when they defaulted toward the side of privacy. The problem is that Facebook has increasingly been adding new features and new privacy options while defaulting them to being world-viewable.

What has people angry isn't that the privacy settings are complex; it's that Facebook has essentially used the increasing complexity to pull a bait and switch with their privacy of the past few years.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com