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****.

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.

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: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:I'll never use Facebook

[jeffasselin]

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