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.

[awehttam]

Which is apparently what he did.

http://www.facebook.com/markzuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg For those wondering, I set most of my content on my personal Facebook page to be open so people could see it. I set some of my content to be more private, but I didn't see a need to limit visibility of pics with my friends, family or my teddy bear :)

too funny

[pertelote]

I have spent the best part of the week trying to adjust my facebook profile to some level of discreteness that I am comfortable with. Have been very unhappy with the "all or nothing" choices, and have started just simply deleting content. I feel a little better, because now I am sure the settings will get some fine-tuning.

Just for fun:
http://www.facebook.com/pertelote

And this is after I have locked down as much as I can without insulting my family and classmates.

Re:too funny

[gleffler]

Actually, it isn't. If you go to the URL of the friends list, you can view anybody's friends list.

See http://www.facebook.com/friends/?id=zuck even though if you go to http://facebook.com/zuck, there's no way to view his friends list.

Re:too funny

[Culture20]

I am seeing that most of slashdot is now on facebook, which is totally sad. I can't reply to everyone, so I had to pick someone, and that was you, congratulations!. Here it goes:

You use Facebook? What a faggot.

There, I feel much better now.

Someone's totally going to troll you on usenet for having an account on /.

Ok so where are the pictures?

[areusche]

I clicked the link in the summary and I didn't find any pictures. So after a quick search I found this http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerbergs-private-photos-2009-12#with-girlfriend-priscilla-chan-from-her-album-moments-have-you-seen-a-sweeter-thing-today-probably-not-1 Enjoy!

Re:I'll never use Facebook

[bkpark]

I am really worried about the fact that Facebook has access to data such as people's real name (that's the point of it, right?)

Um, no it doesn't. It has no real name verification mechanism, so if you are like me and you go by a nickname among your friends, you can register using a nickname. I think at some point they changed it so that you couldn't change the name easily once you register ('didn't used to be that way in its first year), but if you start out with a pseudonym, they don't stop you.

As for other infos, well, use TOR and litter your profile (and friend list) with a lot of false information so that they cannot separate the truth from lie.

Or, as you said, don't use Facebook.

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.

Um, he did it ON PURPOSE

[swein515]

"For those wondering, I set most of my content on my personal Facebook page to be open so people could see it. I set some of my content to be more private, but I didn't see a need to limit visibility of pics with my friends, family or my teddy bear :)"

http://www.facebook.com/markzuckerberg

Re:Um, he did it ON PURPOSE

[Tacvek]

Damnit, s/friend's/friends/.

Also for clarification the reason why the missing friend's list is damning is because hiding the friends list is one of the options that was removed.

he meant to do it, then had the pictures removed

[Mr.Zuka]

I think it says a lot about his personality that he posted to his newsfeed that he meant to post the pictures, then somehow the pictures mysteriously disappear. Kind of scary with an ego that he can't admit to a mistake that small. If there ever was a security breach would facebook ever admit to it?

DID NOT WANT

[phantomcircuit]

Note to self: think before clicking links to private pictures of nerd.

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:From Mark:

[ardle]

He got caught with his pants down and egg on his face

Did anyone save a copy of that photo?

my facebook status this past thursday reads

[weirdcrashingnoises]

[name] dislikes facebook's new privacy alert that by default would have made my facebook LESS secure... *rolleyes*

Today's status update is a link to this article with my comment "Oh, the irony!"

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

[TejWC]

Oh, this default is even worse than most people could have imagined!

For example, lets say you go to a party and a "friend" of yours takes a picture of you doing something that looks rather scandalous because you are drunk. And then, your friend uploads the pic to Facebook and tags your name to it. You realize you have been tagged in the photo and you don't want other people to see it. So you untag yourself and send a message to your friend to delete it. However, your friend either doesn't go on Facebook very often or doesn't check Facebook messages so the photo is still up there and there is nothing you can really do about it except pray that nobody else stumbles upon it.

And then suddenly Facebook decides to make everybody's photos Public to anybody. Now this bad photo of you is available to everybody and there is nothing you can do about it except call your other friends in order to get the cell phone number of the guy that took your picture.

Yeah, this default sucks real bad.

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.

What am I missing?

[BlueWaterBaboonFarm]

This is an honest question. I've seen numerous stories about how terrible Facebook's privacy setting are but I just don't understand what is wrong. I've made a dummy account with the same settings as my personal Facebook account. Tell me what you can find out about "Billy Slashdot Perkins". The answer is nothing as far as I can tell. Searching for him on Google or Facebook gives no results as far as I can tell.

As far as I can tell there are two options for privacy on Facebook

(1) Be 'searchable' which means some information about yourself should be included otherwise the search is useless

(2) Not be 'searchable'. Everything you have is private and between you and the friends you have

I have option (1) and I haven't had any problems with it yet.

Please tell me specifically what it is about Facebook that is violating your privacy?

Re:What am I missing?

[sheriff_p]

Hey buddy,

I have my account on the highest level of lock-down. However, if you get the URL to my profile, or you're a friend of a friend, you can still see (and I can't block this):

- My friend list, in its entirety
- Pages of which I'm a fan
- Profile photo
- An option to send me a friend request
- Some other stuff

None of which I wanted. My circumstances are somewhat special, because not everyone needs or wants this level of security, but I do, and I used to have it, and now it's gone away.

-P

Re:What am I missing?

[chialea]

Go to your profile and hit the little pencil icon next to it. You can hide your friends list from there. (Thanks to another /. commenter, who pointed this out to me.)

BTW, make sure you lock down the settings on what your friends' apps can see, unless you trust them not to accidentally add malware.

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.

Things I love...

[nilbog]

I love it when I read a story about another story that is all about photos, yet neither story contains or links to any.

Re:I'll never use Facebook

[jeffasselin]

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

Facebook has no privacy anymore

[Psx29]

You used to be able to exclude yourself from the system. Now you can't even opt out of the Facebook API, there is information that is accessible to 3rd party developers as long as your friends install an app. Used to be you could opt out of it though. After this whole debacle I ended up requesting deletion of my facebook account, which should be processed in 10 days.