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Comment by 3am | Hacker News Reader

That's fair, but you can see why everyone is skeptical that is the reason behind this patent filing?

Shame on me, but I don't follow Facebook's announcements about privacy enough - it never even occurred to me they'd deny something like thi Just like Google started out monetizing the semantic graph (and providing them an superior search engine in exchanges is their goal. I thought that was the whole point, and the reason behind the $80B valuation (ads served in a Google like way using the social graph instead of the semantic graph). It just follows that this would require a certain degree of integration between ad partners and user tracking.

ps -I'm not trying to single you out and lay the blame for all my gripes with Facebook on you, I hope it doesn't seem that way.

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Last week, everyone lost their shit about Facebook's logged out cookies. Your traditional megacorp is going to say "oh well, so it goes, repeat the party line" and move on. Internally though, this spurred some engineers to actually investigate it, which lead to an audit, which lead to the discovery that we'd forgotten to delete the user id out of the cookies, which lead to a fix and a blog post and a clarification of our policies.

So, beyond understanding the skepticism, I actually think it's really important, and personally[0] encourage it. We're not going to get better at privacy if people don't jump our shit over every perceived misstep, because we've either failed to make the right decision, or we've failed to communicate our decision effectively.

All I'd ask is that we try to keep this communication as high signal as possible, and avoid going down roads with no plausible resolution[1]. I think that's best for Facebook, the internet, and discussion in general at HN.

[0] I speak for myself and not my employer, Facebook Inc, blah blah blah.

[1] If you think Zuckerberg is evil and that we're all just going to try to screw you, there's nothing I (or anyone else) can tell you that is going to change your mind.

If you think Zuckerberg is evil and that we're all just going to try to screw you, there's nothing I (or anyone else) can tell you that is going to change your mind.

Nothing you can say, perhaps, but here's something Facebook can do: establish a years-long history of having new privacy options/controls default to the setting which reveals the least information to other users. Doing that for several years should help Facebook overcome their reputation for not doing so (a reputation which it has for a reason).

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