Facebook Privacy Basics | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Privacy Basics

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12 pointsdavweb8 comments

Step 1. 'Delete' Facebook account

Step 2. Wonder whether or not your data is really deleted or not

Step 3. Realise all of your family, friends, acquaintances, ex-friends and 'random people who gave you their email address at some point and they accepted your friend request but god knows why', are on Facebook.

Step 4. Sign up for Facebook again

Step 5. Wallow in your own shame and self-hatred for doing so.

You get more control over your online presence by participating than by opting out...

That sounds like a pernacius religious cult!

Sadly though, you're probably right.

Outside of what people might think of Facebook's approach to privacy, sections of the site like this show that they are at least listening to the feedback of users and making changes as a result.

I can't help but think however that it doesn't go far enough for the hardcore critics, while most other users simply don't care enough to read something like this. Something of a thankless job.

>> "most other users simply don't care enough to read something like this"

It scares me to see the number of people who post publicly on Facebook and the sort of stupid, potentially damaging stuff they post. The only conclusion I can come to is that A LOT of people really don't care or they're too young to understand the implications of posting publicly.

On top of that, it is surprisingly complex to properly manage your public 'face' on facebook, even for tech-savvy people.

For example, whenever I interact with someone I don't know, I usually check if they have a facebook account. But often, especially in Germany, the profile of people exposed to non-friends is minimal to the point that there aren't even any photos of said person.

I've found that very often the solution is simple: click on the username in the search field, click on 'photos of <user>' and suddenly you'll see a bunch of photos of the user and their friends.

In some cases, the user is smart enough to untag themselves from these photos. If that's the case, I click on 'photos <user> liked' and I often get a few photos with the user in it anyways.

I've made this mistake myself, because it wasn't immediately obvious to me that this was possible, and there were many photos that I'd liked (and even actively untagged myself from), well before the new search bar was introduced.

Another thing I found out only recently, well after the point where I thought I had sufficiently 'scrubbed' my profile, is that I still had many 'interests' that I had entered years ago when this was still an active thing (music, tv shows, etc.). Because of FB's interface changes, I had completely forgotten that I had entered these.

My wife runs a teen drop-in center. It has become expected among the kids that if you have a significant other, you share all passwords (especially your Facebook password). This is their new definition of "trust".

I saw some people doing that with Facebook and email when I was in my mid-teens (mid 2000's). Didn't understand it then and I don't understand it now.

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