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Comment by asveikau | Hacker News Reader

The fact that you found hacker news, created an account here and comment puts you in the category where you poke around with settings and fault others for not doing so. But there are vast numbers of people using Facebook that just aren't going to look at settings. They aren't bad people for not doing this. Default behaviors mean a lot.

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I'm not faulting anyone. I said it only irritates me those who complain without taking any action.

But the possible actions we can take are not equally visible to everyone, and this is true for many things in life outside of software as well. Putting an opt-out somewhere deep in settings while doing things people would likely not want technically solves the problem, but effectively does not.

I might agree with the other commenter. If you can't figure it out yourself (understandable for most people), it ought to be as easy as googling "where are facebook's privacy settings?" I don't have an account, so I can't tell whether the facebook help pages that come up are useful.

In general, I am frustrated when the complaint is about how hard a thing is to do, when sticking that complaint into a web search gives you an easy answer. That doesn't seem to be the case here though?

I don’t know if you’ve used Facebook for a long time, but no matter how many times you’ve gone and managed Facebook settings, if you come back a year later you’ll find that you’ve been opted into all kinds of new garbage, you’ll find that certain options are completely gone (for example, no longer being able to opt out of public search or making your profile photo private) - even if you were a layman who did your research, you will still likely fail.

So what is the appropriate action for you to take here?

I suppose you've carefully read the EULA of every software product you've ever used, and have taken the time to re-review when their policies are inevitably updated?

Perhaps you should also consider that that FB intentionally buries these pages in their site with the specific intent of making it hard to find for users. And even for users who actually find the page, the weaselly language used there gives no indication if the action you're about to take is permanent. There is always some clause that allows FB to retain the data, for "quality assurance" or "data security" purposes.

The correct action would be collective anyway. We need laws requiring such settings to be opt in.

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