Facebook Founder's Pictures Go Public

jamie passes along a Newsfactor piece that begins "In a not-uncommon development for the social-networking leader, Facebook's recently released privacy controls are leaving the company a bit red-faced. As a result of a new policy that by default makes users' profiles, photos, and friends lists available on the Web, almost 300 personal photos of founder Mark Zuckerberg became publicly available, a development that had gossip sites like Gawker yukking it up."

Comments

Karma.

[SilverHatHacker]

It's a b****.

Re:Karma.

[phantomfive]

It would have been if he'd had any pictures that happened to be embarrassing. Instead the most personal thing on there is probably that he's going to visit a facebook company party soon. Woohoo. I was hoping for pictures of Mark drunk with writing or Mark doing a keg stand or something. With the stuff up there that he has, he may very well have left it public on purpose.

Re:Karma.

[antek9]

That should be all the rage on Fark over the next days.

Re:Karma.

[Rogerborg]

Yup. Number of people dumb enough to believe what he said rather than what he did: one, apparently.

I'm trying to figure out why he'd post such a ludicrous and trivially disprovable assertion. Either he's trying to own another news cycle, he really is that dumb, or he thinks that his customers really are that dumb.

He should've left them public

[Karganeth]

He definitely should have left them public. He should've made it look as though he meant to do that and left them on. Somebody will have downloaded them all anyway.

Re:From Mark:

[Khyber]

BULLSHIT.

He set his shit to private, it got exposed, he said "I meant to do that" and then most everything went private again.

Give me a fucking break. He got caught with his pants down and egg on his face.

Re:I'll never use Facebook

[TheKidWho]

Facebook is the government database the government never had but wishes they did.

Re:he meant to do it, then had the pictures remove

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, that's par for the course, isn't it? Naive "I have nothing to hide" never lasts long when the attention comes. Even people who are in the showbiz don't want everybody rummaging around in their private lives. Can you imagine how Zuckerberg's friends reacted to that kind of scrutiny?

Who cares

[Murdoch5]

Facebook might be the social network giant but it's a really pointless site. It's more about showing off how many friends you have who most of you probably haven't met.

Joining groups who's point is to see how many people join the group and most of all showing off your pics and status in life.

I do have a facebook account but I haven't updated it in 3 years which is about when I made it. If you want to keep your life private don't put it on the web. How hard is it to just pass a USB key or pass a memory key and let your real friends see your pics / status or anything else you feel like sharing.

Facebook might be the social giant of the internet but it's also a giant waste of time and resources. Don't complain that your pics get stolen, released or broadcast. If you really want to keep your info private then don't put it on the net.

Re:Who cares

[SpooForBrains]

Because the sample of everyone that you know clearly represents the entirety of society.

I am married, happily, with children. I have a healthy circle of Actual Real Life Friends. I also have a healthy circle of online friends, with whom I converse frequently (usually daily), share parenthood stories, exchange photos, and generally have a Gay Old Time(tm). And that's not even including the overlap between those Real Life Friends and the Online friends.

The Internet is many different things to many different people, and what's true for you is not necessarily true for everyone else.

Poor choice of defaults

[StuartHankins]

Any system which defaults to "share everything" is a fail. You should never have to opt-out, only opt-in, to release data. Otherwise it's way too easy to screw up and show something private to everyone (as in this example).

Re:Poor choice of defaults

[MWoody]

Any system wherein you upload pictures for the world to see is fail for not assuming that's what you want to do? We're not talking an OS or web server here; it's a social site.

I have to ask: if you have private pictures, why are they online?

Re:Poor choice of defaults

[Eskarel]

I wish people would stop making the assumption that because someone shares something on facebook they want to share it with the world.

There are levels of privacy and sharing between telling everyone everything and hiding in a secure lead lined bunker somewhere. I might want to share pictures of my kid with my friends and family who live in other states and other countries without wanting to share that photo with the entire rest of the world.

The reason for using a social site is to allow you to exchange information in a controlled way. If I wanted to just share information with the world I'd stick it up on a public facing web page and let google find it. The problem is that Mark Zuckerberg is an idiot and presumes exactly like you do, that because I want to show my mother her grandchild that I want to share that same information with him and everyone else. Guess what I don't.

I know that the social networking evangalists seem to think that everyone should be metaphorically naked for the world to see and we'd all get along better, and the tin foil hat brigade thinks we should never give our real names even to our spouses, but a lot of times, people want somewhere in the middle.

Re:Poor choice of defaults

[spire3661]

And i wish people like you would stop assuming that you have a level of privacy when you send your stuff to third parties. Unless you have a privacy service agreement with every link in the chain with every provider between here and the person the information was intended for, presume it to be non-private henceforth.

Re:too funny

[Gizzmonic]

If she has any level of discreteness, then certainly she be divided into a single entity!

Re:It's too hard to manage privacy on Facebook

[srjh]

Actually, there's a "Preview my profile" in the privacy settings - it shows you what the general public sees and you can modify it so that it shows you what any specific person sees.

Not sure how long they've had that, but I got a nasty surprise the first time I used that, having previously thought my profile was locked down pretty tightly.

This last debacle was pretty disgraceful, though - sending out a message telling everyone they should change to the "recommended" setting of making everything public by default and even calling private settings "old facebook" rather than actually describing them as what they were. For some reason they still don't realise they're not Twitter.

Re:What am I missing?

[/dev/trash]

You have to be like 20 and want to share all your drinking pics with all your loser friends but your boss is like 30 and he's not into that shit, so he'll fire ya if he ever found all those drinking pics.

Re:I'll never use Facebook

[jeffasselin]

I don't even need Facebook for that, I can get it from your Slashdot profile now!

Re:From Mark:

[Dahamma]

Well, he originally had hundreds of photos on his public profile, and now there are about a dozen.

So either he was bitten by the profile privacy issue everyone is talking about, or he did it intentionally and then changed his mind. The first means he was confused by it, and the second means he doesn't think the default settings were appropriate after all. Which is is?