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Comment by compiler-guy | Hacker News Reader

Facebook changed the visibility of the already-posted posts that had the bad default, without regard to user intent. All they did was decide to do it.

Sure they have internal controls so a rogue engineer can't do it. But if Facebook, as a company, decides it wants to mess with your settings, it can, and it does.

This event is an existence proof of that.

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To reverse the visibility to private, you mean? I can’t start to imagine how they would do that, but “it took five days” points at a very kludgey hack.

> To reverse the visibility to private, you mean?

And also making private anything you legitimately wanted made public, because they couldn't tell the difference.

The privacy setting on a given FB post is most likely a list of which "friend groups" within your account can see the post, and modifying that value in the database would change how the post appears. Whatever you choose is just a different parameter that gets stored on that post and can trivially be modified on FB's side in the future. FB could make every post you've ever made show up as public, and update your profile to be completely public as well. It's completely technically possible, though not too likely to happen.

Regarding the other point - the fact it took them 5 days to revert the privacy status on weeks' worth of posts of some ~14million users just points to them being thorough and _not_ doing it in a hacky manner. A hackish solution could have been done in an hour or two, most likely.

Sorry, I should have been clearer: I used to work there. Knowing how the information is stored and protected, I can’t imagine how one would do it.

> UPDATE posts SET public = true;

584,203,510,091,521 records updated

I broke out in a cold sweat just reading that.

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