Facebook Adds Friend Stalker Tool

nk497 writes "Facebook has added a new tool that brings together conversations and photos between friends onto a single page, but — as usual — has crossed the creepy line. Not only does clicking the See Friendship tool let users view photos, comments and events shared between themselves and their friend, it also offers a search tool to do the same between any two mutual friends, making it easy to see everything any two people have ever said to each other Facebook. As usual, the site should have tested the function out on their users first, with one saying: 'I've always wanted this! And yes, I'm a creepy stalker.' Also, as usual for Facebook, all users are automatically opted in, and there's currently no obvious way to turn it off."

Comments

Put this on the list

[Anonymous Coward]

of reasons not to use Facebook.

As if you needed more.

Re:Put this on the list

[biryokumaru]

No, put this on the growing list of pointless complaints about Facebook. If people didn't post idiocy on the internet, they wouldn't have to be so afraid of people seeing their idiocy.

Re:Put this on the list

[finarfinjge]

I suspect this thread will become populated with any number of "thereottabealaw" comments. This is not the answer. The purpose of facebook is to provide to marketers as much information about you as legally possible. But it isn't the marketers that will keep facebook policies skewed towards "openness" and away from privacy. Government, by its nature, is in favour of knowing as much about you as they can. Thus, governments like facebook. Many companies, such as insurance companies, like to be able to go to facebook and find out as much about you as they can. They LOVE facebook.

So in addition to stalkers and thieves, who already find facebook to be a treasure trove, there are some big time money interests that will make sure that there never is a law. If you are on facebook, everything your "friends" write and post about you is searchable and can be related back to you and your profile. If you are OK with this, more power to you. One day, there will be something that you don't want shared. If you stay on facebook. . . well tough luck buddy, it's shared.

JE

Re:Put this on the list

[Ethanol-fueled]

That's not a knife.

This is a knife!

Re:Put this on the list

[cynyr]

But it's not just me i have to make sure that doesn't post idiocy, but everyone that i do anything socially with. Since facebook has no way for me to remove photos of me posted by other users. The best i can do is remove the tag, but not remove me from the photo or my name from the comments, or have the photo taken down entirely.

Re:Put this on the list

[Cederic]

Why should there ever be a law? Facebook is doing nothing wrong.

There needs to be user education. There needs to be an instilled sense of distrust, scepticism and paranoia.

If the users weren't that fucking stupid as to trust Facebook, there would be no issue.

Re:Put this on the list

[CowboyBob500]

Why not just ask them? I've complied with everyone who has ever asked me to remove a photo of them. If they don't, they're assholes and not worth knowing either on Facebook or in the real world.

Re:Put this on the list

[Monkeedude1212]

Even if you do take the idea of losing a friend lightly - the idea of losing your job over something your asshole friend posted was not at all addressed by your post.

And burning a bridge makes that all the more likely to happen.

Re:Put this on the list

[Anonymous Coward]

That conclusion contains more logic than most people are able to handle.

Re:Put this on the list

[Anonymous Coward]

There’s a difference between “not using facebook” and “not using facebook stupidly”.

For instance, that girl in my friends list who posted the picture of herself doing the duckface in her bra? Yeah, that probably qualifies s an example of using facebook stupidly. It showed up in my news feed (a.k.a. stalker feed) and I’d have commented (“um, maybe you should really think a bit harder before posting this sort of picture on here for just about anyone to see?”) but I don’t really know her very well (at all... I mainly knew her older siblings, and that was about 10 years ago) and I figured it would be politest just to pretend I hadn’t seen it, since a few of her other friends had already commented (ranging from “oh la la” to “wtf?”, and her response was “yah I was gonna crop my boobs out before I posted it”... but she obviously hadn’t).

So, when it comes to posting things on facebook, keep in mind that your friends can see it. And so can your so-called “facebook friends”, many of whom you probably hardly know, and just about all of whom don’t really need to see you in your bra.

Re:Put this on the list

[rufty_tufty]

Hang on, what happened to the Geek's warcry of "Information wants to be free"?

So the big problem here is that if you have ever been an idiot or done something you'd rather forget then either you or one of your friends will purposely or accidentally post it on the internet in a way that can be linked back to you.
I think like the record companies cannot put the genie of digital music/mp3s/filesharing back ion the bottle we as a society can't put all of personal privacy back in the bottle without also losing personal freedom. Unless you want draconian laws restricting information - which I thought was the antithesis of the internet - then we have to accept that if we do embarrassing stuff in public then that will stick with us.
But that's no different from real life, if while drunk I told my best friend's wife I thought she was hot then that will stay with me for the rest of my life too. The difference is strangers/employers can get that information too, but remember they can do it for everyone so the lesson for me here is not to not make mistakes but to make less mistakes than the next guy and to learn from those lessons sooner.
That said I wouldn't want to employ someone who didn't have a good time at University, If they didn't know how to have a party and relax then I'd be concerned they were a well rounded person. So seeing photos of someone drunk off their face could well help you if you met me interviewing you.
The door swings both ways...

Re:Put this on the list

[Pojut]

Two things:

1. If you engage in social activity with the kind of people that would post incriminating photos of you, you need to find a different group of friends.

2. If you engage in incriminating activities in a public place where other people can take photos of you, you need to be smarter about where you engage in incriminating activities.

Re:Put this on the list

[Taibhsear]

Yes, we should have no expectations of privacy. Because if we're not doing anything wrong we have nothing to hide right? And no one ever does anything wrong or makes a bad decision ever.

Re:Put this on the list

[biryokumaru]

You don't have to post drunk, half naked pictures of yourself on the internet. If you want something private, keep it private.

Re:Put this on the list

[zero_out]

True. I posted something negative (but true) about a relative of mine (Janet*), who didn't have access to a computer for a long time, on a friend's wall (Marsha*) as part of an update on my life. I wanted my conversations with her to be transparent because of the history Marsha and I have, and I didn't want my wife to think I was hiding anything. Well, two months ago Janet sent me a friend request, and if I don't friend her without a good reason (i.e. I haven't logged in for months), then I'll catch a LOT of grief from my family. I haven't logged in since to avoid this whole situation, because I don't trust that what I posted on Marsha's wall won't be accessible by Janet. Should I have posted my update on Marsha's wall? Absolutely not, but I didn't foresee all the possible consequences. Now I need to have Marsha delete this from her wall (if at all possible) so Janet won't find this and curse me out. Oops.

Re:Put this on the list

[node 3]

You seem to be confused. Just because you'd like to keep something from general knowledge doesn't mean it's incriminating.

Re:Put this on the list

[CowboyBob500]

If you lose your job because of a photo posted on Facebook, you have an asshole employer who cannot distinguish the difference between your work life and private life, and you probably ought to get a new job anyway - unless the photo is of you doing something illegal, in which case perhaps you shouldn't have done that in the first place. Still finding it hard to have any sympathy here.

Re:Put this on the list

[node 3]

Hang on, what happened to the Geek's warcry of "Information wants to be free"?

There's a difference between information that is in the public's interest (which is the sort of information that phrase refers to: i.e., how to hack your own hardware, trade secrets, etc.) and personal information that can harm (ID theft) or embarrass (personal email) someone.

Re:Put this on the list

[slim]

the idea of losing your job over something your asshole friend posted was not at all addressed by your post.

Don't they have unfair dismissal laws where you come from?

Re:Put this on the list

[QRDeNameland]

Bravo! As a committed Facebook avoider, my problem is not nearly so much with Facebook as the increasing number of people who think they can't communicate with me because I haven't been assimilated into the Zuckerborg. Sorry, that's what you get if you choose a walled garden as your primary communications medium, especially one that's entire purpose is to gather information about you.

Re:Put this on the list

[gknoy]

If you lose your job in a manner that makes you say "well I was better off without those jerks", you're still unemployed. Sour grapes don't pay the bills.

Re:Put this on the list

[slim]

Their point stands if you substitute another word. My thesaurus skills are failing me at the moment, so let's temporarily define "foobar" as meaning "of a nature that you would not like the general public to see".

1. If you engage in social activity with the kind of people that would post foobar photos of you, you need to find a different group of friends.

2. If you engage in foobar activities in a public place where other people can take photos of you, you need to be smarter about where you engage in foobar activities.

Re:Put this on the list

[Monkeedude1212]

They rarely hold up against company paid lawyers is all.

Re:Put this on the list

[Monkeedude1212]

Technically its not illegal or against company policy to have relations with someone who works there - but it's highly frowned upon.

It's happened - so and so hooked up with so and so and now they both need to be replaced. They'll find a reason.

Re:Put this on the list

[edmicman]

Unless you *sell* the sour grapes....oooo an idea!

1. Find sour grapes
2. ???
3. Profit!

Re:Put this on the list

[gknoy]

How likely is Janet* to Friend Marsha*? And then browse her wall until she finds that? It's possible, but seems unlikely, unless Janet already thinks you'd be talking trash about her.

What would be the ramifications about Janet cursing you out? (Just curious.)

Re:Put this on the list

[gknoy]

What happened to the Geek's warcry of "Information wants to be free"?

I believe the "wants to be free" phrase really means, "information posted at all tends not to stay private". We don't want our information to be free. I don't want yours to be, either, generally, but if it's avaiable, it tends to stay that way permanently.

Re:Put this on the list

[gorzek]

Don't mix work and your social life. I know this is hard for some people but really, you're probably better off.

I keep my Facebook privacy settings so that only friends can see anything. I do not accept friend requests from coworkers, past or present. I very rarely associate with anyone from work outside of the work environment.

I don't even do anything outside of work that would get me into trouble, anyway, but my personal life is none of my employer's business and I keep it that way by not mixing the two worlds.

Re:Put this on the list

[grumbel]

Just because its "on the Internet" doesn't mean its viewable for anybody, my whole mail is "on the internet" after all and that is only viewable by me (and google). The problem with Facebook and social networking in general is that they are all extremely bad at telling the user what information is making it to the public or to the friends, so you end up with a lot of involuntary information leaks.

Re:Put this on the list

[slim]

Before Janet joined Facebook, what was preventing your comment from reaching her out-of-band?

Information can easily leak from Facebook into good old fashioned gossip.

Re:Put this on the list

[Mordaximus]

It's not about posting their own idiocy on the internet themselves. It's about others doing it without your consent. You know the people I'm talking about, the ones who refuse to put the camera away at a party, when everyone has had a little too much to drink, and then at first chance post them to facebook and tag everyone they can. Where's the "Allow people to tag me in photos" privacy option?

Re:Put this on the list

[Spectre]

In most states, employment is "at will".

You can be fired for showing up at work early, because you boss doesn't like the color of your shoes, or just for the heck of it.

Re:Put this on the list

[nedlohs]

Except that these days going to the pub while on vacation and having a photo show up is enough to get you sacked from your teaching job.

The solution is so simple though - don't use facebook.

Re:Put this on the list

[grumbel]

Why should there ever be a law? Facebook is doing nothing wrong.

Facebook is doing nothing wrong exactly because we don't have a law against it, which is why we maybe should have a law against it.

I mean seriously, sure users should be educated, but just because users aren't clever enough to avoid Facebook, doesn't make what Facebook is doing acceptable.

Re:Put this on the list

[Monkeedude1212]

I feel like I'm going crazy re-iterating the same point - sometimes its NOT in your control.

Your friends can post things about you - and your employers can look them up... You can have all the privacy settings on their most restricted settings and it does not change this fact...

Re:Put this on the list

[rufty_tufty]

How can we be sure what is in the public's interest? Why isn't it in the public interest that people's past are no longer hidden in mystery(as long as it applies to everyone)? I'm quite serious that yes I have tried to re-invent myself over the years and to some extent have succeeded but I don't understand why people want to try and hide from their past.

I know that some information should remain confidential, medical conditions, bank details, conversations about proposed purchases etc but I can't think of any information that I count as confidential that I would post anywhere online (i.e. blogs, facebook, twitter etc)

Now I grant you that information like DOB, mother's maiden name can be used for ID theft but that has been a poor security model for a very long time. I mean really who keeps their birthday a secret? It will never and hasn't for centuries been a secret what someone's parents are called so the problem isn't the problem of someone joining up the dots or the fact that the information is out there - it always has been. Making something more convenient is not a problem it's called progress. The fact that progress exposes the flaw in what you've been doing all this time is your problem no anyone else's.

Now if you want to talk about dystopian futures where some have the power to watch over the citizens and some don't then I'm right there terrified of the government with you. If we have a society though where everyone watches the watchers because everyone is the watcher then I'm much less worried and in fact think it would be a great boon.
Take for example universal CCTV - very very frightening when only the police/select few have access to it. They could pick and choose segments to order to frame people. If however everyone had access to everything that was CCTV'd in a public place and there were appropriate SW tools to help people search and catalogue it then provided everyone has access then I believe you are less open to being abused/framed not more.
I believe the same applies with online privacy, the more information is out there and the better the average person can connect the dots themselves then the better and safer we all are.

Re:Put this on the list

[slim]

Except that these days going to the pub while on vacation and having a photo show up is enough to get you sacked from your teaching job.

The solution is so simple though - don't use facebook.

Not in any part of the world with reasonable employment laws.

I've seen the story you're referring to, and it seems to me that once it pans out, she should have her job back and some compensation too. Also it seems to me that it's an outlier situation -- if it was common it wouldn't be newsworthy.

The solution to this kind of thing is *not* to start getting furtive about perfectly innocent activities. It's to stand up for our rights. That woman has an absolute right to share pictures of herself with a beer, and to keep her job.

Re:Put this on the list

[zero_out]

The likelihood is very remote, but possible. Janet and Marsha never met, and I have over 100 friends on FB (though I rarely ever used it). Janet and I never got along, but we are civil, considering we are close relatives. She is the type who very well might search all of my friends' walls to see if I posted anything about her. With this new tool, as I understand how it works, she would have a MUCH easier time searching. The ramifications of her finding out would be dramatic. She controls my access to her son, who desperately needs stable adults in his life, and while she is "out of favor" in our family, most would be angry with me for being the catalyst for her latest eruption.

Re:Put this on the list

[gorzek]

Please tell me, what perfectly innocuous things might your friends take pictures of that would ruin your job/life/whatever.

Re:Put this on the list

[node 3]

How can we be sure what is in the public's interest?

That's a form of nihilism that is inherent in every moral/legal/should discussion.

My point isn't to make the distinction in any particular case, just that the distinction exists, and is why "information wants to be free" and "I want my privacy" are not contradictory or hypocritical.

Re:Put this on the list

[Culture20]

Please tell me, what perfectly innocuous things might your friends take pictures of that would ruin your job/life/whatever.

If you drive a Pepsi truck, and your friend takes a photo of you drinking Coke Zero. (Or the other way around)

Re:Put this on the list

[gfreeman]

So ask them to take them down. How difficult is that?
If they refuse, defriend and block them, it removes the tag.

Also, how the hell is your boss (or any other prospective employer) going to find photos of you unless you are friends with them? Being FB friends with your boss is ASKING for trouble.

Re:Put this on the list

[slim]

In most states, employment is "at will".

You can be fired for showing up at work early, because you boss doesn't like the color of your shoes, or just for the heck of it.

This is most certainly not the case in the United Kingdom, and if it's true of the US, it makes me think your legal framework is more than a little backward. Here, there's a short list of fair reasons for dismissal (misconduct, inability to do the job, redundancy etc.) and if the employer can't demonstrate one of those, they can't dismiss you.

OTOH I have seen American colleagues have their employment ended on a whim on several occasions, so nothing surprises me.

Still, the answer is to campaign to firm up your employment law, not spend your life trying to hide stuff from your boss.

Re:Put this on the list

[gorzek]

Apparently somebody really did get fired for that, however they were drinking Pepsi on the job (as a Coke driver). As silly as I think "brand loyalty" rules are, you are pretty much your employer's bitch while on the clock so it's hard to muster up much sympathy.

I'm talking about someone taking pictures of your activities on your own time, without you doing anything illegal or even all that questionable, and still getting fired for it.

Re:Put this on the list

[metamatic]

Just because you'd like to keep something from general knowledge doesn't mean it's incriminating.

We live in a world where everyone has Internet access and everyone has a digital camera. The genie isn't going to go back in the bottle, so I suggest adjusting what you'd like so that it's compatible with reality.

Re:Put this on the list

[kiwimate]

This is true. And (ignoring the tool being discussed in this story for a moment) if your friends do choose to post things about you, they can (and presumably will) do so even if you are not on Facebook.

However -

• if you are on Facebook and have friended that person, you'll have a better chance of seeing it. (Keep an eye open for notifications from that friend listing "47 new photos uploaded in album wild night in Amsterdam last weekend" and if you know you were there - browse the album.) At least then you know about it and can send them a message politely asking them to desist.
• If you are actually tagged in a photo (which would make it easier for someone searching for material to actually find something with your name attached), then you'll get notified, but my understanding is you can remove the tag and that person then loses the ability to tag you in photos posted in the future.

I'm not saying this is a recommendation for using Facebook; just pointing out that you may find it easier to police the use of your visage if you do use Facebook.

My status - I use Facebook because it's a great tool for me to keep in touch with family and friends all over the world. And I set my privacy settings appropriately - it's really not that hard.

Re:Put this on the list

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is "incriminating activities" could be "drinking alcohol, but the person who is interviewing you is straight-edge."

Personally, I'm less concerned with pictures of me doing illegal things surfacing, than I am of being judged on my personal preferences and opinions.

Re:Put this on the list

[lgw]

Yes, in most places in America you don't lose your fundamental freedoms just because you become an employer, though we do keep chipping away at that idea.

Re:Put this on the list

[aesiamun]

so, because you don't like what facebook is doing, it should be a law?

Wow...people like you made NY ban smoking, distracted driving (then talking on the cell phone while driving and then texting while driving...it's all the same thing...distraction!).

If you don't like what facebook allows people to do, don't have a facebook account.

Re:Put this on the list

[clone53421]

Yes, an at-will employee can be fired for “any reason or no reason at all” – but if you were fired for an illegal reason and you can prove this or at least back it up pretty substantially, then you have a pretty good case for a lawsuit.

It works both ways, though... an at-will employee can also leave for pretty much any reason.

Employees who are contracted in for a longer period of time, on the other hand, will also have terms in their contract that ensure their employer can’t dismiss them for no good reason... but in return for that security, they give up their ability to leave that job whenever they want to find work elsewhere.

It’s a give-and-take, and personally I think it’s better this way than having the government dictate to companies whether they can or can’t hire or fire someone.

Re:Put this on the list

[lgw]

Apparently somebody really did get fired for that, however they were drinking Pepsi on the job (as a Coke driver). As silly as I think "brand loyalty" rules are, you are pretty much your employer's bitch while on the clock so it's hard to muster up much sympathy.

I'm talking about someone taking pictures of your activities on your own time, without you doing anything illegal or even all that questionable, and still getting fired for it.

Have you never worked for a small company? One place I worked - if they saw a picture of you smoking, they'd fire you. If they saw a picture of you on a motorcycle, they'd fire you. If you gave some excuse for not attending the company picnic, and they saw a picture that gave the lie to that excuse? Fired. Heck, one guy got fired because a VP walked past his car in a the parking lot and thought it was unacceptably messy.

Employers do things that make sense to them. Those things might not make sense to you, and would be even more mysterious to your friends, whould wouldn't get the overall vibe of the company. Sure, sure, long term you're better off not working for crazy people, but when you're young and inexperienced, your prospects for working for non-crazy people are pretty slim.

Re:Put this on the list

[clone53421]

In that case, why don’t you go find the post you made on Marsha’s wall and delete it? You can delete any post you’ve made... you don’t have to get Marsha to delete it just because it’s on her wall.

Re:Put this on the list

[clone53421]

Where's the "Allow people to tag me in photos" privacy option?

Right next to the “Allow people to create a blogspot, upload pictures of me, and name me in the description so it gets indexed by Google” privacy option.

Re:Put this on the list

[lgw]

"Information wants to be free" like "water wants to run downhill". It's not some moral statement, or warcry, just a recognition that unless you work hard to keep your leaks plugged, all your secrets will flow away. Which is the problem here of course - Stalkerbook delights in shooting holes in everyone's buckets.

Re:Put this on the list

[eugene ts wong]

Also, who's going to believe you at the next round of job interviews, when you say, "He fired me because my car was messy?".

Re:Put this on the list

[Nadaka]

Its called wine, and bootlegging is illegal in a lot of places.

Re:Put this on the list

[HomelessInLaJolla]

I am surrounded by sour grapes--they are the other homeless who resort to begging and panhandling and chasing around on the homeless treasure hunt to go here and get this and go here to get that and go someplace else to get more and still have nothing worthwhile by the end of the day.

So... exactly how do I profit? I do not have sour grapes. I did exactly what the parent poster indicated,"Well, I am better off without those jerks anyway"... but I am still homeless and everyone else in the world, eating their own sour grapes and unhappy with the jerks they work for, is completely against open charity.

So, again, exactly how should I go about profitting from all of the sour grapes around me? I, personally, have very good grapes--nobody wants to pay for them but, since I am homeless, everyone thinks they are entitled to my grapes for free.

Eat my grapes!!!

Re:Put this on the list

[gorzek]

I'm surprised that company was able to stay in business if they're that psychotic about their employees' activities outside of work.

I've worked for a few small companies and that sort of thing doesn't sound like the norm. I tend not to volunteer information about my personal life and my coworkers and managers generally don't ask. Nobody gives a shit if I don't go to a company picnic or something.

I'll have to take your word for it that any of this really happened but it makes me wonder how anyone can even work under such conditions. If managers are spending that much time checking up on their employees' leisure activities, who the hell is running the company?

I would guess that most companies are pretty sane and don't go to the extremes you've experienced. You can't account for every psychotic manager.

I'm sorry you had to work for crazy people, though. I hope you are happy elsewhere now. :)

Re:Put this on the list

[grumbel]

so, because you don't like what facebook is doing, it should be a law?

The issue isn't that I don't like what Facebook is doing, but that most users don't even know what Facebook is doing with their information. If you wanna collect tons of private information from users, I don't quite see the issue with making it crystal clear to them what is actually happening with that information and yes, privacy laws should enforce that.

Re:Put this on the list

[Anonymous Psychopath]

Their point stands if you substitute another word. My thesaurus skills are failing me at the moment, so let's temporarily define "foobar" as meaning "of a nature that you would not like the general public to see".

1. If you engage in social activity with the kind of people that would post foobar photos of you, you need to find a different group of friends.

2. If you engage in foobar activities in a public place where other people can take photos of you, you need to be smarter about where you engage in foobar activities.

The word you're looking for is "indiscreet".

Re:Put this on the list

[Lunix Nutcase]

Hang on, what happened to the Geek's warcry of "Information wants to be free"?

The problem with that phrase is that it only applies to other people's works and property (especially when they are proprietary). Try to apply the "information wants to be free" meme to GPL code and you will see their hypocrisy in action.

Re:Put this on the list

[zero_out]

In that case, why don’t you go find the post you made on Marsha’s wall and delete it? You can delete any post you’ve made... you don’t have to get Marsha to delete it just because it’s on her wall.

If I could, I would mod you +1 Informative. I was not aware that I could do this, and thought that only the owner of the wall could do so. FB permissions / privacy are so confusing.

Re:Put this on the list

[Maxo-Texas]

Except that things which were perfectly okay 10 years ago are often no longer acceptable today. You don't even do these things any more-- but you get graded as if you did.

Say you are in a picture smoking a cigarette- a lot of companies will fire you today because of that. Even if it was just a stunt puff.

You may be in a conservative area and now be a conservative but get graded because you were once liberal - and vice versa.

You may have been mildly drunk or mildly angry.

It's like the difference between policemen and automated traffic enforcement. If they really seriously start automatically enforcing all traffic laws automatically, you'd be violating the laws a dozen times a day. It would cost you $1200 a day to drive and everyone would lose their licenses quite rapidly. Do you signal every lane change? Sure you always get your headlights on quickly enough at dusk? Did you exit at 35mph? Even tho the feeder is 50mph and the freeway is 60mph (seriously- what the hell are they thinking putting a 35mph speed just for the exit??? between two faster flows of traffic).

I'm all for the hypocrisy being exposed (I'm against drinking for the public! But here's a picture of me in my private club drinking). But the only rational response long term to 24 hour surveillance is to ignore it.

I'm sure since I'm a bachelor and date that this will cause some snooping females to think differently-- even tho I'm up front that I'm a bachelor.

Re:Put this on the list

[lgw]

I'm surprised that company was able to stay in business if they're that psychotic about their employees' activities outside of work.

They were incredibly successful for a small company, and grew to dominate their vertical market. They were largely self-insured, and would fire people for doing things likely to make their health insurance rates go up (but also for crazy reasons, but the smoking/motorcycle stuff was at least in the employment agreement).

I'll have to take your word for it that any of this really happened but it makes me wonder how anyone can even work under such conditions. If managers are spending that much time checking up on their employees' leisure activities, who the hell is running the company?

From Wikipedia:

Five months after the merger was completed, the new ownership of the company began to make broad changes to the daily operations of the business.[5] As the Houston Business Journal reported, "the blending of the two firms has created a culture clash that's led to the departure of Reynolds employees, from executives to field technicians, both through lay-offs and of their own volition, since last August [2006]. Reynolds' local employee base has shrunk at least 10 percent since January 2006."[5] In October 2007, pre-merger CEO Fin O'Neill left the company.

They had an incredibly high turnover rate, and eventually had to open offices in new cities just because eveyone in Houston had heard of them and they had a hard time hiring. They simply didn't care. Small companies are simply spread across the spectrum of human behavior, because their owners are. Computer Associates was worse (their former CEO is in jail), and they were large and publicly traded. Ideally people just work for better places, but in the meantime, privacy still matters online.

Re:Put this on the list

[Culture20]

If you created the post, you can delete it. This tool can help you find the post faster.

Re:Put this on the list

[Culture20]

Why should there ever be a law? Facebook is doing nothing wrong.

Facebook is doing nothing wrong exactly because we don't have a law against it, which is why we maybe should have a law against it.

I mean seriously, sure users should be educated, but just because users aren't clever enough to avoid Facebook, doesn't make what Facebook is doing acceptable.

wrong and illegal are two separate things, and neither is an absolute subset of the other.

Re:Put this on the list

[HeckRuler]

As much as I ought to get a new job where the boss isn't an asshole, where the users understand software development, where flextime is acceptable, where I'm paid an extra $20K, in an industry that isn't powered by fear, controlled by foreign influence, fueled by vice, or run on questionable economic principles, where nearby housing is affordable, and the neighbors don't suck, where they run Linux, and code in C, under the GPL, where my skills are honed and expanded, where the commute is painless and cheap, where my future employment is in my hands, in a city my wife can find a job with similar properties, where Sharepoint has been banished from the land, where they pay for overtime but don't ask for it often, where they're loose with vacation and don't mind weeks of unpaid leave, where buzzwords earn you slap across the face, where the mythical man month is understood, where the chairs are comfortable, the carpet is clean, and temperature doesn't have a 20 degree swing.

As much as I ought to go get that job, it turns out that they're not hiring at this moment. I guess we can't all have the perfect life delivered to us on a silver platter. So you can take your apathy, add it as a bullet point on your resume, and shove it up your ass.

Re:Put this on the list

[Anonymous Coward]

Not just friends but also family. I have an Aunt and an Uncle who just love to post everything on their facebook accounts. I am not thrilled that my picture is intermingled with pictures of idiots acting like, well, idiots. Despite my best efforts I have little or no control over this, and despite it all I do love them despite them being ignorant hick rednecks one chromosome short of a full chimp. (stupid stupid facebook with your too fucking easy interface - I hate you right now.)

Re:Put this on the list

[DDLKermit007]

The thing is, Facebook was never intended for someone who is in that kind of position. It was built for STUDENTS, and by god I wish it still required a school email account. People who can post stupid crap, and not have it ruin their life yet. I've checked every Facebook profile of prospective employees. Most of the time I've found out I don't want them once I see their profiles. Runs the gamut from drog use, alcoholics, to straight up racism I've found, and narrowly dodged said bullets because of Facebook and people's inhability to not put every last detail of their wacked out life on FB page for the whole world to see. It's almost as good as a background check. Profile private? Just add them, few people pay any attention to who is adding them.

Once hired? I never look at their profile again unless were actually friends.

Re:Put this on the list

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not a discreet ruined/not-ruined state, a lot of things can simply mar your career. The corporate boss being aware that you enjoy any sort of recreation is essentially a gray-to-black mark on your record. Do you enjoy games, books, comics, ren faires, star wars conventions, furries, or heaven forbid, political rallies? If so, then your boss will see that as a distraction from work, or worse, a liability. Unless of course it co-insides with HIS activities. So.... golf, pretty much.

That's a little extreme, but welcome to corporate life.

But in all honesty, if my boss ever finds out that I'm an atheistic democrat, then although he won't fire me, he'll assuredly make me wish I wasn't working here anymore. And the guy has enough soft power around here he can casually make sexual jokes in front of the female head of HR.

Re:Put this on the list

[Anonymous Coward]

That's awfully presumptuous of you, to assume that everyone worthwhile happens to define "having a good time" as going to a generic college party.

Re:Put this on the list

[Anonymous Coward]

You sound like captain hindsight from this week's south park.

Re:Put this on the list

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you signal every lane change? Sure you always get your headlights on quickly enough at dusk? Did you exit at 35mph? Even tho the feeder is 50mph and the freeway is 60mph (seriously- what the hell are they thinking putting a 35mph speed just for the exit??? between two faster flows of traffic).

Yes, yes and yes. You're one of those assholes I see driving around at dusk without lights, changing lanes without signaling, and tailgating me on the off ramp, aren't you?

Re:Put this on the list

[davester666]

Obvious way to turn off feature: don't have conversations using Facebook.

Re:Put this on the list

[niado]

Say you are in a picture smoking a cigarette- a lot of companies will fire you today because of that.

What is your definition of "a lot"..? Also, can someone get us a list of these companies so that we can all avoid them?

Re:Put this on the list

[DerekLyons]

Hang on, what happened to the Geek's warcry of "Information wants to be free"?
 
So the big problem here is that if you have ever been an idiot or done something you'd rather forget then either you or one of your friends will purposely or accidentally post it on the internet in a way that can be linked back to you.

But that's no different from real life, if while drunk I told my best friend's wife I thought she was hot then that will stay with me for the rest of my life too.

That's the core of average Slashdotter's mindset - they don't believe that their actions should have consequences. They believe they should be able to do whatever they like, to whoever they like, whenever they like. They only rights that matter are *theirs*.

Re:Put this on the list

[cdombroski]

Just as a random thought: Most places ramp speeds are posted on yellow signs (US, other areas may vary) which are cautionary rather than statutory. Presumably this means that the curves and sight distance on the ramp are such that a much slower speed is warranted; however, you can't be pulled over just for exceeding that speed, you'd have to be doing something else as well (though reckless driving is probably an easy one at this point)

Re:Put this on the list

[Maxo-Texas]

I'm not sure if there is a list. it's apparently common in florida. My company does not allow smoking on the premises and 5 years ago would not hire new smokers if they were dumb enough to admit it (or smelled of smoke I guess).

It's common enough tho...

http://digg.com/news/lifestyle/Employees_getting_fired_for_smoking_or_being_obese
http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/42755
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/10/28/60minutes/main990617.shtml
http://www.thebostonchannel.com/news/9959391/detail.html
http://businessshrink.biz/psychologyofbusiness/2007/09/27/employees-fired-and-fined-for-smoking-obesity-and-blood-test-results/

Just google "fired for smoking".

Re:Put this on the list

[clong83]

Oh, if only I had mod points...

Re:Put this on the list

[D Ninja]

Ah, but what you are failing to remember is there are many jobs in which employers care about the stability and safety of an employee, and not just "are they doing illegal things." For example, I have a friend who, if he is caught drunk driving, or if he gets more than X hundred dollars in traffic fines in one year, he loses his job immediately. The reasoning behind it is - if he is that unstable and untrustworthy in his personal life, we cannot trust that he will handle the job that he was hired to do due to the extreme danger it would present to the people who put their lives in his hands every day. (No, he's not a pilot...but...similar idea.)

So, while I do agree employers should stay out of employees personal lives to a large degree, there is some aspect of managing risk which they (rightly) want to do.

Re:Put this on the list

[Homburg]

Where's the "Allow people to tag me in photos" privacy option?

Under "Privacy Settings" > "Customize" > "Things others share" > "Photos and videos I'm tagged in"

Re:Put this on the list

[QRDeNameland]

Please tell me, what perfectly innocuous things might your friends take pictures of that would ruin your job/life/whatever.

How about a picture of you at a cancer patient support group, which is then discovered by a prospective employer that is concerned about keeping the cost of employee health benefits down? Even if such discrimination is technically illegal, do think such knowledge couldn't affect your ability to get a job?

Re:Put this on the list

[CowboyBob500]

Perhaps instead of ranting off anonymously on an Internet forum, you'd be better off growing a pair in real life and "making your own luck" as the saying goes instead of meekly accepting the comfort of your existence. You'll actually find that they are hiring, they're just not advertising. The dream job is always there and always within reach, however you don't get it just by sending off resumes into the ether, you get it through being bloody minded enough to demand it.

Re:Put this on the list

[noob22]

It wouldn't matter if they had laws against firing for certain reasons anyway. I was "laid-off"/fired from a company in the mortgage industry that constantly hired people so they could "lay off" for whatever reason they wanted. The termination of my employment was chalked up to "reduction in force" along with about 10 people a week. FYI: I worked in refinance which saw a boom after the "crisis", at least were I was working.

Re:Put this on the list

[chrismcb]

Since facebook has no way for me to remove photos of me posted by other users. The best i can do is remove the tag, but not remove me from the photo or my name from the comments, or have the photo taken down entirely.

Re:Put this on the list

[chrismcb]

Since facebook has no way for me to remove photos of me posted by other users.

This is obviously facebook's fault, since everything else on the internet (and the entire world) allows you to remove photos posted by other users.

Re:Put this on the list

[clone53421]

They do have laws against firing for certain reasons. Your case would have been an interesting one – if you believed they had fired you for an illegal reason, you could have made a good case that it wasn’t really a “reduction in force” since their hiring/firing practices evidenced that this wasn’t the case. Then you’d just have to make the case that they used that as a catch-all excuse to fire you for an illegal reason.

Re:Put this on the list

[bandmassa]

Exactly why I don't friend up colleagues unless they're actually in my social circle and trusted. As much as I hate Facebook, because my kids use it and most of my friends use it, I have no choice but to be on it, too. That sid, it's a useful tool, and although I'd prefer to use another, more responsible service, I don't lose sleep over privacy. If there are those who would want to use my "information" against me, they can get that all sorts of way, they don't need Facebook, nor does it make it any easier for them. We make it easy for our personal info to be stolen, not the tool we chose. It's like blaming the hammer for your blackened thumbnail.

Re:Put this on the list

[Lotharus]

Only trouble is, the solution is NOT so simple. If I don't use facebook, that doesn't stop any of my facebook-using acquaintances from tagging me in their photos. Sure, it won't be a tag linked to a facebook profile, but it could be my name in text, possibly locatable by some search engine or other.

Re:Put this on the list

[HeckRuler]

Oh for sure, hounding the HR of companies with daily phone calls and following them home, that'll force them to hire me...

Sorry, but I don't live in Chicago. There are jobs in Chicago, great jobs, jobs I could go out and hunt after. But unfortunately, my wife has a far more selective job then mine, there's only so many foundries in America. Since her's pay is better, and I can find SOME kind of work in my field nearly anywhere, I follow her. So I don't live in Chicago. I'm sorry, but the dream job really just isn't there, and you're coming off as ludicrously optimistic. The sort of motivational speaker you want to punch in the face. The one who is getting paid millions to tell people how to stop being so poor.

And I'm not trying to be overly pessimistic either, I have a job, it's passable. A few things could be better. And so I go job hunting every now and then for a better one. I few weeks ago I thought I was a shoe-in for an embedded C position, that would have been awesome (as long as it didn't transform into a liaison position between the boss and the Indian programmers). But the point is I AM trying to make my own luck. I'm working on my own projects to keep my skills sharp. I'm trying new things so I can put a blurb down on my resume. I'm asking people I run into about any positions they may know of. A fellow gamer said his place needed someone, but I sure as hell doesn't going to take a 54% cut in pay.

But what you're doing essentially is blaming me for my boss being an asshole rather than, oh I dunno, blaming the asshole himself. Hence the urge to punch you in the face.

Re:Put this on the list

[julie007]

You just described my job.

Re:Put this on the list

[HeckRuler]

Just out curiosity, what city do you live in?
And what point of your commute would an ambush most likely go unnoticed?

RAWK

[mark72005]

Sweet, this will make it much easier to jump to conclusions about which of my friends are secretly bumpin' uglies

Nonissue

[Schezar]

If this information was already extant, and this functionality is just an aggregation and compilation of said extant data, then there is no problem. No new information is being provided: public information has simply been correlated, something any person could do on their own at any point prior.

Making already legally accessible data more readable is not in any way wrong. Anyone who fears or is angry about this is in for a shock over the next decade or so as technology reveals all sorts of already public things about them, and younger generations simply won't care.

Re:Nonissue

[ridgecritter]

This seems a bit like saying that because a computer is just a really fast abacus, there's really no difference between them or their effects.

At some point, mere quantitative increase becomes a qualitative difference.

If it now takes 2 seconds to do with Facebook's new tool what used to take 2 days, that's a qualitative difference (degradation of privacy) that people might reasonably be concerned about.

Re:Nonissue

[Schezar]

Ahh, but our entire society's expectations of privacy have been unreasonable for the better part of the last several decades. This false sense of privacy has existed solely due to the inefficiency of access to public data, much in the same manner that entire localized business models disappeared with the advent of national television and freeways.

It's a nonissue only because the work, both in law and expectations, to actually address the fact that we're finally having to come to terms with the fact that there is a lot of perfectly legally accessible information about all of us in the wild will never be undertaken by our government or our society, and technological workarounds will evolve far faster than any legislation or agreement can. The point is moot. If Facebook didn't do it themselves, someone with a screenscraper and a database would.

If you can see it, you can correlate it. This is a nonissue only because there is no possibility of a solution for anyone who is upset.

Re:Nonissue

[clone53421]

Agreed.

Of course, all this information is already available to me. I could click around the site and find everything said between my mutual friends by sifting through their accounts. But that would take ages, and eventually — hopefully — I’d either get bored or ashamed of creeping on my friends. This makes it possible to stalk in seconds.

“Hopefully”? Bored or ashamed? Seriously?

He greatly underestimates the ability of a bored stalker to be creepy...

Re:Nonissue

[VolciMaster]

wish I could vote this one up!

Re:Nonissue

[Anonymous Coward]

it now takes 2 seconds to do with Facebook's new tool what used to take 2 days

I'm alarmed that you have such detailed knowledge on the time it takes to stalk on Facebook.

Re:Nonissue

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't matter if there are plans out there to compile a highly dangerous chemical weapon either, I mean after all, all the original bits and pieces of information are out there, it just needs someone to be willing to put in half their life to study the necessary chemistry.

Seriously, you can take that viewpoint to the nth degree, the more you do so the easier it is to see that having information agregated can in fact make it far easier for people to find things out they wouldn't otherwise have been able to due to time constraints, or the very human trait of missing a key point in the processing of manually trying to agregate.

There's no doubt that automated agregation can bring a whole new level of understanding about something that people otherwise would not have had unless they were VERY determined. You're right that people could've done this sort of thing manually themselves, but the question is not could they, it's would they? and in many cases the answer would've been a resounding no. When it's done for them, that changes things greatly- as with my example above, would a terrorist spend half his life learning chemistry to make a deadly chemical weapon? the chance is pretty low. If they had all the information they need summarised in easily explained plans they could follow, how many more would give it a go?

It's an issue of risk mitigation- you'll never eliminate the risk when it's already out there and just needs effort to compile it, but you can greatly reduce the risk of that agregation being done for malicious purposes by keeping agregation a more difficult process. Again, I'm not saying keeping it difficult makes you completely safe, but it does at least lower the chance of problems arising so it's certainly not just a simple case of "It can be done anyway so it doesn't matter if it's made easier, it's not a problem".

Personally I could care less, I use Facebook as a convenient way to share photos and that sort of thing, but if it's anything important or confidential I'll phone them or go round to their house, but I can see this causing problems for those naive users who chuck everything and anything about their lives up on Facebook.

Re:Nonissue

[morgan_greywolf]

The point is moot. If Facebook didn't do it themselves, someone with a screenscraper and a database would.

Quite correct. And it would be even simpler than that. It's Web site. At the end of the day, Facebook presents your browser with HTML and JavaScript. A competent individual could write a script to do this in very little time with any modern scripting language -- Python, Perl, Ruby, or [insert your favorite here]. Or they could create a mashup with Google Web Toolkit. In any respect, HTML is, more or less, easily parseable programmatically.

Those griping have no room to do so. You provided the data to Facebook, and explicitly or implicitly, you have Facebook permission to display this data to other users. You have no idea how these users will end up using the data. If you have a problem with this, or any other aspect, you should terminate your Facebook account. Now. No buts. I don't want to hear it.

Re:Nonissue

[whoever57]

as technology reveals all sorts of already public things about them, and younger generations haven't realized they need to care yet

FTFY

Re:Nonissue

[IndustrialComplex]

I don't think that our desire for privacy is in any way unreasonable. That something can be done does not mean that it should be done.

That someone could track my vehicle (Via license plate recognition software) to the urologist, then to a specific pharmacy. Perhaps a trip to a specific type of physical therapist, and so on...

All of that is 'public' information. And NONE of it should be automatically assumed to be non-private simply because of the inability to avoid touching the public view. We drafted protections on our medical information because of such problems.

We should not be so eager to make the term public synonymous with anti-privacy.

Re:Nonissue

[Monkeedude1212]

Exactly. Often times just because something isn't illegal doesn't mean it should be easily doable. In most cases, the main deterrant is the amount of effort required to preform the action, so no law is really needed.

I also wonder what the GP's thoughts are on Firesheep - I mean sidejacking is considered illegal but when you're doing it over an unsecured WiFi its like the information has become public. But you can do a lot of damage by simply logging in under someone else's Facebook. Most teenagers would love to screw around with a friend's facebook - but wouldn't bother because of the work required to get that info. Now an add-on makes it a bit easier.

Re:Nonissue

[cynyr]

This would be true if it didn't present any new data to any new poeple, but Facebook has a record of totaly fucking up new features. Like the one were you could chat as anyone else, or the one where you could stealth friend people.

Any bet son if you can type in any 2 names and get back more info than the privacy settings would let you see looking at their page.

Re:Nonissue

[Schezar]

So how do you address this? Is it illegal for me to watch you drive your car to the urologist? Is it illegal to then google for your license plate and/or address to see who you are or where you live? Is it illegal to see you visit the pharmacist, and remember that I'd also seen you at the urologist at some point in the past?

Should it be illegal to say to my one friend "Hey, I saw IndustrialComplex at the urologist, and again at the pharmacist. Funny that! His license place was 'ASSMAN' too!" ?
Should it be illegal for my friend to tell his friend what I told him?
Should it be illegal for my to tell ten of my friends?
Should it be illegal for me to make a blog post about it?

At what specific point do you intend to make something like this illegal?

Re:Nonissue

[ebuck]

While the society's expectations of privacy fluctuate daily, there's no excuse for trust being transitive on facebook.

If I trust you, that certainly doesn't mean I trust everyone you trust. I also won't trust everyone they trust, nor will I trust the close and personal friends of the trusted friends of the trusted friends of the people you trust.

Transitive trust is just broken. It doesn't matter what society expects to be private; because, trust is not handled the way facebook has modeled their software. Just like it doesn't matter what society thinks a good car should look like, as driving is not handled by taking the shortest path between two points (a straight line that goes through buildings and obstructions).

Re:Nonissue

[Stooshie]

The behaviour you are describing is close to being that of a stalker. Courts can already make decisions about what constitutes stalking, so making decisions on this should be just as easy.

Although a lot of people on slashdot are not affected as "currently entering mother's basement" is not really of interest to anyone.

Re:Nonissue

[node 3]

Stalking can be illegal, even if the individual actions aren't. It's all about the effects you are having on another person.

I don't know about IndustrialComplex's specific example, but his point stands. Privacy is pretty important and shouldn't just be ceded because it's difficult to objectively define where the line should be drawn between invasion of privacy and public knowledge.

Re:Nonissue

[syphyre]

Asimov had a story about this...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_Past

Re:Nonissue

[gknoy]

As the Penguin said (I paraphrase), never underestimate the power of scotch tape and lots of free time. Someone with an axe to grind will make the time to piece together scaldalous information, whether it's easily aggregatable or not. This feature just makes it easier for people who were mildly curious, rather than obsessed, to see things like this.

Re:Nonissue

[gravis777]

I completely agree. Most of the "issues" on facebook stem from people not knowing how to work their privacy settings. If you are already sharing information publicly, what is wrong with adding an easy way to search it? Its like people when they started complaining that Facebook was sharing phone numbers. Well, you had to provide your phone number in the first place, and there has ALWAYS been the option to hide it.

I for one welcome this change - its been a feature I have been wishing for for a while

Re:Nonissue

[IndustrialComplex]

At what specific point do you intend to make something like this illegal?

It may not be easy to define in a manner which achieves a universal agreement, but we do know that 0 is too little, and all is too much.

If I had the answer, I'd be knocking on the office of every official in order to make it law.

I can however, offer some guidelines:

That which is technically infeasible today, may be possible tomorrow. Err on the side of privacy, because once something is public, it cannot become private again.

Make it illegal for the government to achieve through private means that which would be prohibited if attempted via official means. What I mean by that, is that a government official should require a warrant to collect data from a third party if that data would require a warrant to collect from the primary party.

In otherwords, If a conversation is recorded by a third party, and the third party did not require a warrant to record that conversation, the government should still require a warrant to obtain the recording as if they were acquiring it from the primary party.

Re:Nonissue

[Anonymous Coward]

It now takes 2 seconds to do with Facebooks new tool what used to take 2 seconds to do by having an employee or an investigator do it.

This doesn't erase privacy that you once had... it erases an asymmetric advantage between the haves and the have-nots, empowering ordinary people by giving them access to information that members of the elite have had for ages.

What it will do is strike a hefty blow against hypocrisy. That's going to be painful at first, being that the structure of society makes certain levels of hypocrisy a necessity to survival. But it's still a positive development.

Re:Nonissue

[lgw]

Make it illegal for the government to achieve through private means that which would be prohibited if attempted via official means. What I mean by that, is that a government official should require a warrant to collect data from a third party if that data would require a warrant to collect from the primary party.

In otherwords, If a conversation is recorded by a third party, and the third party did not require a warrant to record that conversation, the government should still require a warrant to obtain the recording as if they were acquiring it from the primary party.

Now that would be a good law! Simple, bright-line rule to protect eveyone. Clearly, nether party would stand for it.

Re:Nonissue

[HeckRuler]

Yeah, the younger generation will still have bosses from this and prior generation. Good luck kiddos.

Re:Nonissue

[Anonymous Coward]

If I put my information online, and someone reads it, it isn't stalking. You don't want people or employers to know intimate details about you or your interactions with others? Either adjust your privacy settings or refrain from posting anything you wouldn't want someone else to see; preferably do both.

Privacy on the internet

[Dancindan84]

Here's a helpful Venn diagram for people who still aren't sure:
http://graphjam.memebase.com/2010/10/25/funny-graphs-never-forget/

Re:Privacy on the internet

[betterunixthanunix]

s/Internet/web/g

Private communications have been possible on the Internet for a long time now: http://www.gnupg.org/

(Not that anyone can deal with the inconvenience of that sort of thing...)

Re:Privacy on the internet

[Dancindan84]

It was (somewhat) a joke, but honestly your friends already have access to the conversations on your wall. They're effectively public for your anyone on your friends list. All this does is compile them by participants.

This is just fear mongering. It's the equivalent to an article like, "People you trust to let into your house may be able to compile a list of your valuables to use maliciously!!!" If you have any meth addict/kleptomaniac friends, you don't let them into your house. If you have any creepy/gossipy friends you don't want to see your facebook stuff, don't add them on facebook.

Re:Privacy on the internet

[icebraining]

Privacy on the web: FOAF+SSL on a private server.

Re:Privacy on the internet

[Anonymous Coward]

Private, in so far as you trust your recipient.
PGP/GPG provide nothing to prevent your friend from pressing the FWD button or copy/paste to another e-mail - and that's assuming their keys haven't been compromised.

Re:Privacy on the internet

[SigmundFloyd]

If you have any creepy/gossipy friends you don't want to see your facebook stuff, don't add them on facebook.

As if it were possible to not add real-life friends on FB without offending them. Get real...

Re:Privacy on the internet

[digitalchinky]

Walls are not always just accessible to people in your friends list - A good many people (I guess most) have their wall set to public, random strangers that have absolutely no relationship at all can easily trawl through and gain access to entire albums and all kinds of chatter.

Friendster also has a similar kind of "feature" - Private Profiles you would ordinarily think are locked down - these can still be accessed, at least the albums can be anyway - click on the profile picture, it then gives you a link above the full sized image to view all their public albums. Simple as that. I don't know if this is intentional or a bug...

Re:Privacy on the internet

[clone53421]

Put them in your limited profile group and don’t tell them.

Re:Privacy on the internet

[node 3]

Facebook isn't the same as letting people into your house (although to follow that analogy, it's basically letting anyone you know into your house, whether meth-head or saint), it's the same as being their friend (really, anything between acquaintance (or even just a business relationship) all they way up to family/loved ones). The things you do with one set of friends is not necessarily something you want known to another set or with your family, etc. But with Facebook, the only way to accomplish this is to not use Facebook in the first place.

There are plenty of people who take this extreme option, but on the other hand, Facebook is huge and avoiding it can mean sacrificing a large amount of social interaction (probably why Slashdotters are more likely to cry "delete Facebook!" than the general populace). It's a very useful site, and entirely rational to use it, even if the privacy implications are worse than you are comfortable with. And it's also entirely rational to complain about those privacy issues in the hopes that they will be addressed.

Re:Privacy on the internet

[gknoy]

Cultivate a reputation for forgetfulness.

Re:Privacy on the internet

[slim]

The things you do with one set of friends is not necessarily something you want known to another set or with your family, etc. But with Facebook, the only way to accomplish this is to not use Facebook in the first place.

No, this can be accomplished using Facebook's "groups" feature.

Re:Privacy on the internet

[node 3]

The things you do with one set of friends is not necessarily something you want known to another set or with your family, etc. But with Facebook, the only way to accomplish this is to not use Facebook in the first place.

No, this can be accomplished using Facebook's "groups" feature.

Not between mutual friends. You can't limit what your friends share about you.

Re:Privacy on the internet

[Anonymous Coward]

s/Internet/web/g

Awesome! No more worrying about my posts to alt.binaries.startrek.adult!

Re:Privacy on the internet

[slim]

I'm not sure what you're saying here.

Let's say Alice knows Bob, Alice knows Carol, Carol does not know Bob.

If Bob publishes a photo of Alice, and tags it as her, then yes, Carol can see the picture by default.

Alice can prevent this (by setting the privacy settings for "Things others share/Photos and videos I'm tagged in"), and she can limit it by friend-type. I have it set to "Friends only, except Limited Profile".

Now, if Alice publishes a photo of Carol, then of course both Bob and Carol can see the photo, even though Bob doesn't know Carol. This is regardless of any tagging, and I don't see how it could be prevented, unless we're to say we're opposed to anyone ever putting personal photos on the Internet.

"there's currently no obvious way to turn it off."

[somersault]

Well duh. If you don't want your friends seeing who you're talking to, either don't friend them, or change your privacy settings so that they can't read your wall posts etc. Otherwise they have exactly the same information already available, just in a slightly less convenient format.

Sure it's a little creepy, but you already see a lot of this stuff on the main updates page anyway, this is just making it more comprehensive.

Well...

[contra_mundi]

What else can you expect from a datamining company.

Blame?

[ilovegeorgebush]

Stop blaming facebook!

They're merely capitalising on the realities of the relationships that we give them. Blaming them each and every time a new feature is added that is simple common sense and intelligent programming/design/utilisation of the information we permit they use is childish; if we didn't use these tools then they wouldn't feel obliged to innovate and refresh their featureset.

If people seem stalkerish..

[jDeepbeep]

Why the worry about your "friends" doing stalker-ish things to you? Didn't you accept their request (or they yours) based on some level of familiarity and/or trust? It's not strangers watching you. It's people you agreed to let into your little online life.

Re:If people seem stalkerish..

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason I don't use Facebook is because of the number of people I know that can't truthfully answer your question with no.

Re:If people seem stalkerish..

[Tom]

That is the #1 problem with Facebook (and almost all other social networking sites): You only get a binary setting.

I have a few close friends, who by all means could see whatever they want to, if they'd ask I would tell them anyways.

But I also have a lot of not-so-close friends, acquaintances, people I'm friendly with. Whatever you want to call it, there are degrees of friendship. And Facebook doesn't recognize that.

Re:If people seem stalkerish..

[slim]

But I also have a lot of not-so-close friends, acquaintances, people I'm friendly with. Whatever you want to call it, there are degrees of friendship. And Facebook doesn't recognize that.

Yeah it does, if you can be bothered with the admin.

You can create groups, and categorise your contacts into them. Then you can specify how much of your profile and your activity can be seen by each group.

I have a "limited profile" group, into which I place people who ask to be a "friend", when I feel it would be rude to ignore them, but don't really want them to see everything.

You can also choose to prevent friends-of-friends from seeing your stuff.

At worst, the defaults are possibly a bit too open.

Re:If people seem stalkerish..

[at_slashdot]

Yes, I'm not afraid about this, what I'm afraid that one of my friends uses a silly app like FarmVille or whatever that demands access to "friend info" and then FarmVille will know all my discussions with my friend and by FarmVille I mean the entire world.

Re:If people seem stalkerish..

[Tim C]

You don't use Facebook because of the number of people you've added as friends not based on some level of familiarity and/or trust? Seems to be a PEBKAC to me...

Re:If people seem stalkerish..

[Anonymous Coward]

From what I've reads, this thing enables friends-of-friends to aggregate interaction that would have been hidden, or wouldn't have otherwise been presented to them directly. I trust my direct friends on Facebook with any and all of the things I've posted there, but that trust shouldn't implicitly extend to their friends.

Now, of course, if I don't want Friends of Friend to see my interactions I shouldn't have public interactions with Friend. But for Friends of Friend to be able to aggregate all my public interactions, ever, with Friend crosses that creepy line.

Re:If people seem stalkerish..

[frozentier]

Yeah, and then the people at farmville will know that your child spilled his spaghetti on the floor, that your mom came for a visit, and they will see the picture you posted of your dog eating Doritos from a can. Hard to tell what farmville will do with that information.

Re:If people seem stalkerish..

[mlk]

Yes it does. It supports groups. I have one set up "NotClose" for people I don't really know. When posting personal updates I set it to "All friends but the people in the group "NotClose"".

I also have all photos default to same.

You can add as many groups as you like and control privacy that way.

(I'm sure you think this is the wrong way round, but I am a closed networker, that is I only add people that pass the "Would I be happy to invite this person to a BBQ". If not I don't add them, if I have to add them they get put NotClose and only see a tiny bit of my profile).

Re:If people seem stalkerish..

[Tim C]

Not to mention, if that all seems like too much hassle (to people who will happily spend hours configuring their own machines just so?), just don't post the more private stuff on Facebook.

I have some friends I'll tell anything to, and do, and others I'd rather not know that sort of thing. Guess what - that sort of stuff doesn't end up in my Facebook status. Duh. Worried about photos? Don't do it in public. (And to fend off the obvious retorts, hell yes I get drunk, and any employer/future partner/etc who would object to that is saving me time and effort by pre-selecting themselves out of the running)

Re:If people seem stalkerish..

[Cederic]

Advertise carpet cleaning products and offer discounts on Doritos from a specific online retailer.

Who in turn will seek to leverage their relationship, selling your vetinary services and cheap student loans for your child.

Information is valuable.

Re:If people seem stalkerish..

[Anonymous Coward]

Violation of privacy doesn't require practical application.

Re:If people seem stalkerish..

[corbettw]

I have about 20 different lists of people on Facebook. Some things I post, I post for everyone. Other things, only a select group can see them. It really isn't that difficult to manage.

Re:If people seem stalkerish..

[slim]

Advertise carpet cleaning products and offer discounts on Doritos from a specific online retailer.

Crap! I'd better cancel my Facebook account; someone might target some ads at me...

Re:If people seem stalkerish..

[icebraining]

Or instead of Doritos you're drinking a beer and then you get fired.

Re:If people seem stalkerish..

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah but people in a group can add others no?

So your "good friend" can add your mum to your rubber pee party fetish group...

Re:If people seem stalkerish..

[slim]

Or instead of Doritos you're drinking a beer and then you get fired.

That looks like a cut and dried case of unfair dismissal.

Either that or there's more to the story than the article gives us. (e.g. it's some wacky religious school where the contract stipulates no drinking even outside work)

Re:If people seem stalkerish..

[oji-sama]

There are various levels of trust. I've had a couple of friends who I wouldn't trust to keep 'half-naked drunk pictures' (someone was talking about such here) to themselves, but would feel the need share the hilarity with the whole world. Not that there's really anything/much wrong with that, but ...

Re:If people seem stalkerish..

[gravis777]

You are, of course, assuming that the average Facebook user is not 14 and accepts every single friend request presented to them in some popularity contest to see who can reach 1000 friends first.

Its really not that hard to set your page to "friends only" and accept requests from only people you know.

I have NEVER had an issue with the privacy settings on Facebook, and I have had it for four years. People just need to realize that you may not want to post pictures of your kids in the tub or in swimsuits publicly for the whole world to see - know who your friends are, know your privacy levels, and even if you do know all that, don't post stuff that you don't want other people to see.

I had to yell at my mom for posting financial stuff about me to my wall instead of in a message. Use a bit of common sense!

Re:If people seem stalkerish..

[gravis777]

Forgot about this groups thing they added. I need to check into that. This is something I have been wanting for a long time

Re:If people seem stalkerish..

[Anonymous Coward]

She wasn't fired, she resigned and then complained about not having a hearing (WTF?). I have a feeling they tried to let her go for some other reason... like about her being an utter moron.

Re:If people seem stalkerish..

[slim]

Aha, unfortunately "group" is an overloaded term.

You can categorise your contacts into groups which you can think of as ACLs. These are entirely under your control, and you'd probably have groups like "very close friends", "close family", "extended family", "acquaintances" etc. Those are the ones I was talking about, and no, nobody else can modify them.

The other kind is something more like a newsgroup. They'd have names more like "Penweddig Comprehensive School Alumni", and yes there are various options about who can join, which are configurable by the creator. You might choose to have it completely open, or allow any member to invite people, keep admin rights for yourself only, or add additional admins.

I'd suggest that *probably* Facebook isn't the right medium for this rubber pee party fetish group of yours.

Re:If people seem stalkerish..

[Surt]

Sell it to Kraft so they can work on unseating that Doritos buying habit you have?

Re:If people seem stalkerish..

[pitchpipe]

I have a "limited profile" group, into which I place people who ask to be a "friend", when I feel it would be rude to ignore them, but don't really want them to see everything.

If, at this point, you are putting things on Facebook that you don't want people (just about everyone) to see... well that's just plain silly.

Re:If people seem stalkerish..

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone that has so far been forced to stay outside of facebook (due to stalking and death threats but that's another story), I have to ask whether it's possible to prevent one such group from seeing what "friends" I have in another group?

Re:If people seem stalkerish..

[icebraining]

You should re-read the article.

She was (called in to the principal's office and) told that she should resign.

"being told to resign" is being fired.

Re:If people seem stalkerish..

[icebraining]

Isn't that an UK concept? Does the US have anything like that? The At-will employment doctrine seems to be against it.

Re:If people seem stalkerish..

[jenningsthecat]

Why the worry about your "friends" doing stalker-ish things to you?

The fact that you singled out the word 'friends' as you did underlines the weakness of your argument. Sometimes, friends become enemies, or inadvertently do stupid or careless things. Sometimes people misjudge, and befriend people who end up being jerkwads. Even at that, in everyday life I don't worry too much about 'friends' doing 'stalker-ish things'; that's because I'm not usually worried about the authorities putting the tools into their hands and then encouraging them to become creepy stalkers. Unfortunately, in Facebook-land that doesn't hold true.

Aren't we over Facebook yet?

[cindyann]

Personally I think it jumped the shark about two months ago.

I rarely look at it.

I've filtered out about half my "friends" because if I wanted to know what they had on their toast this morning I'd sign up for twitter and follow their stupid tweets.

Re:Aren't we over Facebook yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't know what jump the shark means. Stop saying it and looking like a fool.

Re:Aren't we over Facebook yet?

[Spad]

For those playing the game, Jumping The Shark is the point at which something has done the best it can ever do and can only go downhill from then on.

I'm not sure Facebook has jumped the shark and if it has, it was way back before all of the recent privacy outcry and probably before it opened its membership to the general public.

Re:Aren't we over Facebook yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are way to young. Get off my lawn. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jump_the_shark

Nathan

Re:Aren't we over Facebook yet?

[cindyann]

Mark Zuckerberg, is that you?

Re:Aren't we over Facebook yet?

[cindyann]

The best it can do...

Or has ceased being interesting so now they're resorting to pulling ever greater stunts to try to lure people back in.

I look forward to some day in the future when my great grand children ask me where I was when man first landed on the moon and when Fonzie jumped the shark. And I'll say, "I was glued to the TV screen." And then they'll ask me what a TV screen is.

Re:Aren't we over Facebook yet?

[HeckRuler]

For me, it started when they let the highschoolers on. That was before '06. Maybe I was just being elitist, but I didn't think opening the college network to outsiders was a good idea. Then they opened all the networks to each other as college people moved around or graduated and got out of town. That was when the pitfalls made themselves apparent and I stopped embracing facebook. It didn't really hit me full force though until my mother joined. That's when I realized exactly where this was going and I trimmed everything, restricted what I could, and cut off a swath of semi-friends. Not that any of that is going to help, as my friends will still hop on and tag me in random shit.

Solution

[papasui]

Delete your Facebook account like I did. Although I'll admit that the first week of not knowing what crops my friends were growing was a little hard on me..

Re:Solution

[slim]

Delete your Facebook account like I did.

... or you could keep it, and not post anything you consider private on it.

Re:Solution

[dintech]

That doesn't stop random asshats tagging you in photos.

Re:Solution

[betterunixthanunix]

Or you could delete it, and stop passively encouraging others to be Facebook users.

Re:Solution

[slim]

You can disable that if it really bothers you.

Re:Solution

[thomthom]

Doesn't stop them if you' re not on either... only difference is that it doesn't link to a profile but just lists a name. If you do ahve an account, and someone does tag you, you can remove it.

Re:Solution

[Archangel Michael]

Or random asshat/friends randomly tagging you in random images that aren't even photos of anything, in some sort of mass campaign of sorts.First time I was tagged in one of those I was like Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?!?!?

Re:Solution

[Anonymous Coward]

This was the main reason I deleted everything I could from my account, removed all my friends, changed my name, and then let my account sit that way for a few weeks before deleting it. Any remaining references to me hopefully were indexed by search engines with the new fake name during that time.

Re:Solution

[dziban303]

My friends only grow one kind of crop.

Re:Solution

[parkrrrr]

But what we really want to know is, do you own a television set?

Re:Solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Neither does deleting it.

Re:Solution

[buck-yar]

You can't delete it, you can only deactivate it. Which basically means other people don't see you. You're account is still there, still able to be logged into. If you do log in, it reactivates it to the world.

Re:Solution

[betterunixthanunix]

I thought that had changed a while back, so that an account count be permanently deleted?

Re:Solution

[Anonymous Coward]

...neither does deleting your account. People can tag you in photos even if you don't have a Facebook account.

Re:Solution

[HeckRuler]

Damn, really? I haven't been on facebook in years and wasn't aware. Of course, tagging itself didn't exist back when I actually used facebook.
So how long will it be until another feature comes about that I'll have to disable manually?

Re:Solution

[Altus]

Which is a problem in and of itself, but its only really a problem if you have a unique name. Sure, thats John Smith in that album but how do you know which John Smith.

Re:Solution

[clone53421]

Or a unique face...

Re:Solution

[Altus]

I dont think anyone is going to go through every tag of John Smith to find the person they are looking for. Facial recognition software is a pretty big problem though.

Re:Solution

[stickystyle]

That doesn't stop random asshats tagging you in photos.

Yeah...but it's pretty easy to adjust the privacy settings so that only you can see the photos you are tagged in, effectively turning off the 'feature'. Also the 'random asshats' would be people you explicitly added as a friend.

Try actually using the site before you just repeat the same tired phrase you hear over and over.

Re:Solution

[dintech]

None of this is default behaviour though. It might be tired and you might be sick of hearing it over and over but that's because it's a problem for a lot of people. If it wasn't a problem by default, you wouldn't hear about it.

For you (and me in other cases) it's obvious that these and other more dangerous things might be configurable but for many non-technical people, it probably doesn't occur to them at all. Judging by your reaction to me, it sounds like you have very little sympathy for that and that they get what they deserve. I think that says more about you than me.

Re:Solution

[stickystyle]

None of this is default behaviour though. It might be tired and you might be sick of hearing it over and over but that's because it's a problem for a lot of people.

[citation needed]
If it is a real problem, that *real* people (not just slashdotters) care about, they need to seek out a solution...that already exists. If it is too advanced for them, and it is still an issue for them on facebook then they need to practice self preservation and remove their account.

Judging by your reaction to me, it sounds like you have very little sympathy for that and that they get what they deserve. I think that says more about you than me.

Yep.

The AntiSocial Network

[NYMeatball]

I'm as big of a facebook hater as the next guy, but it seems like Slashdot's favourite pastime is getting on a social network for being, well, social.

If their inference is that facebook should become an antisocial network, I think Slashdot honestly has that market segment covered pretty well already.

Re:The AntiSocial Network

[junglee_iitk]

That is totally correct. By the way, I cannot find the link to 'Browse friendship' anywhere... oh that bitch... thought it would be ok to be 'friends'... eh eh eh... ehheh heh..

Re:The AntiSocial Network

[Anubis IV]

I don't think anyone wants it to be antisocial. What I do think people want, however, is to have their privacy respected and to have control over it. As I recall, I registered back when Facebook still had around 50K users (my university was one of its first big breaks), and the settings I configured then in no way reflect the reality of my privacy today, largely due to unexpected and unwelcome changes Facebook made over the years which automatically opted me in to having information publicly available that I had explicitly expressed a desire to keep private in the past. It's that sort of behavior that gets them ragged on and trashed in the media. If Facebook would just stop making public information that we told it to keep private, I think it wouldn't be getting nearly as much bad press.

Re:The AntiSocial Network

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think it's that /.ers hate the idea of others being social, it's just that many tends towards the idea that friends have to be nearly as smart as themselves -- and about most of the same topics -- or they're not worth having as friends. Ivory Basement Syndrome.

Re:The AntiSocial Network

[Elbowgeek]

Or perhaps we should start an alternative to Facebook called "Assbook" in which people sign up to specifically express hatred and lack of desire to associate with others. Now instead of individuals posting updates which read "Just had the best bowel movement of my life" you'll see "@fredjones: I fucking hate your goddam bowel movements!"

And Mafia Wars: Way more realistic.

Re:The AntiSocial Network

[Anonymous Coward]

What I do think people want, however, is to have their privacy respected and to have control over it.

And therein lies the rub. It is not reasonable, in today's world of corporate power, to ask that the global corporate database delete information. EVER. If one cannot live without posting one's privacy online then one cannot reasonably complain that one's privacy has been disrespected.

Common sense seems harder and harder to come by in an age where it is becoming required just to keep ones dignity. Don't post your life to the cloud or be willing to accept the consequences. Don't like it? Take your government back.

Re:The AntiSocial Network

[Anonymous Coward]

And therein lies the rub. It is not reasonable, in today's world of corporate power, to ask that the global corporate database delete information.

You should have stopped there. The whole "you got what you deserve" point you spend the rest of your comment making is, if you're out of college, distasteful.

Re:The AntiSocial Network

[DerekLyons]

Facebook made over the years which automatically opted me in to having information publicly available that I had explicitly expressed a desire to keep private in the past.

It's been said before, but it bears saying again since it doesn't seem to have sunk in: if you don't want people to know about it, don't post it on the internet. Seriously. Don't blame Facebook because you can't keep your hands off your keyboard.

Re:The AntiSocial Network

[Anubis IV]

You're so very right and so very wrong. The adage is absolutely correct, of course, and it does bear repeating (despite the fact that it has sunk in with me, thanks, and I only post data that is fine with being spread). Your other point is very wrong, however. We still need to place the blame due Facebook at its feet, and hold it accountable for the mistakes it makes. There's plenty of blame to go around however, and if people are posting videos, images, or text that they may later regret, the blame falls on them too for being stupid enough to do so, even if they thought it was private information. Both parties are at fault, but "Internet user is stupid" is not nearly as interesting or unexpected as "major company betrays user's trust (again)." Nor was it the point of my previous comment.

As an aside, speaking personally, I know it's popular to attack folks with highly-modded comments by making assumptions about them, but I only post things that I'm fine having out on the Internet as a whole, should that ever happen to me. Even so, I have a preference that the things I specify as private should remain private, not because I have anything to hide (I live my life in such a way that I will never have to answer to a future employer, spouse, or child for a photo or video that was taken of me (i.e. I simply don't do compromising things)), but because I cherish privacy. I'm fine sharing my daily life with those around me, and I'm fine if that information does go public since there's nothing in my life that I'm ashamed of. I just would prefer that it didn't. It's a simple matter of preferences for me, and I would prefer that Facebook honor them as they said they would.

Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

I normally agree with slashdot... but this article protreys this in WAY to negative of light. FB has screwed up in the past, but just because it releases a new feature does not mean that it instantly violated privacy of its users. As I understand it, you can only view this page if you have permissions any ways.... so basically.... its just moving everything onto one page. Hardly a stalker tool if the info was already there, you just had to look

This existed a long time ago...

[Anonymous Coward]

...doesn't anybody remember the 'See wall-to-wall' feature? It would simply display a mashup of all of the wallposts between two mutual friends.

I believe it was ditched after comments were implemented, as it was initially difficult to go back and forth between friends walls to read a conversation.

Re:This existed a long time ago...

[Anonymous Coward]

'Wall-to-wall' is still there, but it gets disabled if one of the two users has high (proper) privacy settings.

Simple solution: email

[noidentity]

Also, as usual for Facebook, all users are automatically opted in, and there's currently no obvious way to turn it off.

And as usual, Facebook is discussed as if it weren't opt-in. There are plenty of other ways of communicating with people.

Re:Simple solution: email

[Cederic]

Sadly there are a lot of groups of friends that use Facebook for all of their communication. If you're not on Facebook you can't be in their clique.

"Why didn't you come along? We've been arranging it on Facebook for weeks"

"You looked fantastic in his video. What do you mean, 'What video'?"

I have two lives. One in which I participate, which includes face to face contact, use of online forums, youtube, picasa and email, and one that exists only on Facebook, where I exist but only in a vague form, unsubstantiated, realised only through inference and unable to contribute, respond or even view.

It's hard trying to work out what the ghostly facebook me should know and react to, so that the real-world me can continue to participate.

Re:Simple solution: email

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not. If you know just ONE idiot who uses it that turned on autosync in the iphone app, Facebook has your data. No opt in OR out.

Re:Simple solution: email

[noidentity]

I have two lives. One in which I participate, which includes face to face contact, use of online forums, youtube, picasa and email, and one that exists only on Facebook, where I exist but only in a vague form, unsubstantiated, realised only through inference and unable to contribute, respond or even view.

Mr. Cedric... it seems that you've been living... two... lives...

Re:Simple solution: email

[clydemaxwell]

aside from whether anyone considers facebook necessary, the issue is that the service they signed up for, and the service they now use, have different privacy issues. so it is now an opt-out procedure every time they add some new security debacle. the opt-out is, if you're lucky, a setting. if unlucky, it means leaving facebook.
I myself have what I call a read-only facebook, I post nothing and comment rarely. It is similar to twitter (but more universally used). Still, I get concerned about who can see my friendship network.

Re:Simple solution: email

[jvkjvk]

One with another "e" and one without? :)

Regards.

Reasoning Re:Nonissue

[leuk_he]

And if do or say anything that you are ashamed for(or will be ashamed for in some years), you should not have done it in the first place.

And don't forget advertisers already have this information available to make better targeted ads, so this only equals the balance.

Oh, and don't forget thefacebook really cares about what privacy is.

Jurassic Park

[MonsterTrimble]

To paraphrase Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldbloom): "Yeah, but your programmers were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."

Facebook == Public Website == Public Billboard

[Qbertino]

People need to be aware that Facebook is hardly anything more than a modern version of Geocities without the ability for it's users to violate the Geneva Convention with exceptionally bad Webdesign. It adds in a little tools that enable linking and conecting for total webdev-n00bs and makes it attractive to use your real name and real contact data, as it has amassed users in ways never seen before. Mostly due to the aforementioned n00by-friendlyness.

Whenever I search someone online, their Facebook entiry pops up first, if they have one. That should hint where Facebook is headed.

Bottom line: If it's on Facebook, it's public. In more ways even than it would be if you'd post it on some obscure website that hasn't been scanned by the searchbots yet. If you behave accordingly, you won't be too surprised whenever something like this happens.

Re:Facebook == Public Website == Public Billboard

[countSudoku()]

Then why have a fucking password? If it's public, just let everyone login as anyone and do anything, it's public, right? I'd love to share harmless pictures of my daughter on farcebook with only my friends... fakebook makes this fucking IMPOSSIBLE to do without also adding the risk that my photos will now be their property, shared and collected by the crapplication developer/scammers, and "private" investigation/data scrapers using data the way they please (usually against people getting jobs at companies unconcerned with privacy or ethics). Yeah, public sites with a password seem odd to me. Your argument == fail.

Oh, I think I see the problem

[SmallFurryCreature]

Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

ws: Facebook Adds Friend Stalker Tool

Gosh, within one line, asking people to join Facebook and then yet the Xth article about how dangerous facebook is for your privacy.

We know this, but we don't care because we care more about our friend count.

Facebook is a nudist colony. Fine if you want to air your tonker but then don't complain people can see it. You can't share all your personal details withour your personal details ending up shared.

I wonder how people who use Facebook and complain about privacy go through life in general:

Omg! I bought this phone with a subscription, but now I do the math I actually end up paying much more for the phone! How can this be?

Oh no, I bought this gadget with monthy payments and now the payments are more then the original price, why!

I borrowed money for my house, now the bank thinks it owns it. Why didn't anyone tell me!

I streaked naked down the high street, now people are claiming they saw me! I didn't know that what I do in public can be seen by others!

I gave a full confession to a cop and now they using it against me in a court of law! Won't someone safe me!

If you do NOT want everyone on facebook to see what you do, don't use facebook. It ain't hard. It is not an essential product. Billions life happy lives without it. You can too. And the first person to claim that it allows them to keep in touch with friends they never bothered to keep in touch with before I will beat until they learn the difference between a friend, a distant aquintance and a stranger.

Re:Oh, I think I see the problem

[qoncept]

Facebook allows me to keep in touch with the acquiantances I never bothered to keep in touch with before.

Re:Oh, I think I see the problem

[AnonymousClown]

The choir here approves - Rev. SmallFuryCreature!

BUT .... as someone who explained the privacy issues to someone who was about to sign up with Facebook and did anyway, I can tell you that it makes no difference UNTIL, on their birthday they get a shit load of "Happy Birthday"s from people that they don't know or don't know at all - even though they explicitly chose NOT to have that information made public. THEN they realize what the privacy issues are with Facebook.

Facebook's privacy options are bogus.

Re:Oh, I think I see the problem

[at_slashdot]

Facebook is a nudist colony. Fine if you want to air your tonker but then don't complain people can see it. You can't share all your personal details withour your personal details ending up shared.

To use your analogy, the problem is that if you go to a nudist colony you have an expectation that nobody will take your pictures and post them on the first page of the newspapers or send them to your coworkers. Sure, you are naked and you are fine with that, but maybe your boss is not fine with it. I am not troubled by this change since I don't have any secret, what's worrying me is that my friends might have intrusive apps that ask for "friend info" and then my info that was supposed to be in a relatively private circle (the nudist colony) suddenly become much more public than they were supposed to be. Again, I don't post anything on Internet that I wouldn't post in a newspaper, but that still doesn't make me fan of these information sucking applications.

Re:Oh, I think I see the problem

[Tim C]

We know this, but we don't care because we care more about our friend count.

I don't give a shit about my friendship count. I do however care about what my friends are doing - those that are overseas (on holiday or permanently), those that I knew from school/college but lost touch with for years, etc.

Seriously, I don't understand the hate that Slashdot pours on social networking sites.

Re:Oh, I think I see the problem

[slim]

what's worrying me is that my friends might have intrusive apps that ask for "friend info" and then my info that was supposed to be in a relatively private circle suddenly become much more public than they were supposed to be.

I seem to be saying this a lot in this discussion - but you can disable that.

There's a privacy setting to control what friends' apps can see about you -- distinct from what friends can see about you.

You might argue that the default is too open. I can sympathise with that -- on the other hand the purpose of the system is to share information with friends, and if everyone had it locked down, it would defeat that purpose.

Re:Oh, I think I see the problem

[at_slashdot]

I know that, but do you trust Facebook and Facebook apps? I think just recently there was news that Facebook apps didn't follow the privacy rules that they agreed to, or something like that.

Re:Oh, I think I see the problem

[Anubis IV]

I wonder how people who use Facebook and complain about privacy go through life in general:

In real life, there's this thing called "trust" that many of us have with our friends. If you're good at picking friends, your friends will actually do things like maintain your privacy or look out for your interests in addition to their own. Now, I know that some basement dwellers have difficulty with this concept, but there are those of us in real life that are fortunate enough to have people we meet face-to-face with from time to time who behave in the manner I just described. Having people like that in your life makes managing your privacy a lot easier, since you can trust that they will not share something that would make you look bad.

As for your assertion that Facebook is a nudist colony, maybe it's becoming that, but it certainly didn't start that way back when I joined. When I joined, it was more of a casual, invitation-only club with private rooms for groups to meet in. Over time, however, they've been removing doors, tearing down walls, and stripping our clothes, all without asking, then wondering why we're getting upset about the changes. It's no wonder people complain about it.

Re:Oh, I think I see the problem

[slim]

We know this, but we don't care because we care more about our friend count.

In fact, in my experience -- which may differ from that of others -- Facebook was the first social network site *not* to suffer from the "must get as many friends as possible" problem.

The first one to come to my attention was sixdegrees.com -- long dead, although someone seems to have grabbed the domain again -- which had the potential to provide some interesting numbers. Just how many friends-of-friends do I have? How many 3rd degree friends, etc. But it was ruined by hordes of people taking it as a challenge to get as many first-degree "friends" as possible: spamming all their 2nd degree friends and asking for a reciprocal "add", massively skewing the figures. MySpace was the same.

Perhaps *because* it is used for fairly personal updates and conversations, fewer people seem to add strangers as Facebook contacts.

At least, that's the way it seems to be among my circle of friends.

Re:Oh, I think I see the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Facebook is a nudist colony.

Yeah! It's like Hustler with fat chicks.... YUCK!

Re:Oh, I think I see the problem

[StuartHankins]

The difference is that every minor thing can be recorded forever. To use an obvious example, pretend you picked your nose driving down the road one day. The other drivers might have seen it, but in Facebook terms not only does everybody you've ever known see it, but they can choose to send it to their friends and their friends and their friends. You might eventually end up on Tosh.O or something.

At some point you have to say, wow, this is getting out of hand, now I'm paranoid to go out and do things because something might be misinterpreted and come back to haunt me later. When all activity can be recorded and transmitted easily you lose your privacy.

Re:Oh, I think I see the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Facebook is like having a webcam installed at the nudist colony.

Re:Oh, I think I see the problem

[Requiem18th]

And that's exactly one of the things I love about NOT being on facebook. Geez I don't even use the same skype/msn account to every workplace I've gotten. It's incredibly awkward to bump into somebody I haven't talked to in ages -- and have no interest in talking to ever again.

Re:Oh, I think I see the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

I think its like if your email provider all the sudden made your emails public, is it okay because you could have just not used that email provider? By your logic thats how it works.

I think Seinfeld says it best...

[Chameleon Man]

To reference an episode of Seinfeld...

GEORGE: Ah you have no idea of the magnitude of this thing. If she is allowed to infiltrate this world, then George Costanza as you know him, Ceases to Exist! You see, right now, I have Relationship George, but there is also Independent George. That’s the George you know, the George you grew up with — Movie George, Coffee shop George, Liar George, Bawdy George.

JERRY: I, I love that George.

GEORGE: Me Too! And he’s Dying Jerry! If Relationship George walks through this door, he will Kill Independent George! A George, divided against itself, Cannot Stand!

Re:I think Seinfeld says it best...

[mrxak]

As somebody who wears a lot of masks, I defend my internet from my RL and my RL from my internet as best I can. Heck, I try to keep my various internets from each other and my various RLs from each other too. Divisions are important for sanity, to be sure, George was right.

Re:I think Seinfeld says it best...

[the_hellspawn]

Yes, I agree. I even have different profiles in Firefox for each of my 'social' activities on the Internet; one for every day, one for web development, and one for business stuff. I have even thought of making a couple more for other activities; like one set up for a proxy server (this one I really should do :)). That is just how I roll. A bit of paranoia never kill anyone. A bit to much and they are in a corner chewing off their finger nails.

Re:I think Seinfeld says it best...

[ebuck]

If you can't divide your multiple personalities, how can you be sane?

Re:I think Seinfeld says it best...

[node 3]

I defend my internet from my RL and my RL from my internet as best I can.

For many (especially here), the Internet is RL. What you call RL is just <AFK>...

Fearmongering as usual.

[Anonymous Coward]

People on Facebook could always see posts between mutual friends (Wall-to-Wall, anyone?). This just expands and cleans up the feature that's always been in place.

Nothing to see here, move along.

Re:Fearmongering as usual.

[Beerdood]

Yes, exactly. The first paragraph is very misleading - specifically "it also offers a search tool to do the same between any two mutual friends, making it easy to see everything any two people have ever said to each other Facebook". Ok, when I first read this I thought that *all* conversations were being shared, including private message sent between the two. Obviously that isn't the case here and there's nothing to be concerned.

I mean cmon, complaining about something that finds all wall posts between two folks? The whole reason people post on a wall, as opposed to sending a message, is for everyone else to see! If it's meant to be private, then it wouldn't be on the wall! There's nothing "creepy" about this, it's all information that was accessible anyway

Re:"there's currently no obvious way to turn it of

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the whole point. I've tried to turn off some of those features, but there's no way to turn off separate features on facebook. You can't block people from seeing what you comment about on other people's walls without preventing people from commenting on your own wall. I would like to be able to have more control over what I'm sharing and with whom. This takes it to a whole new level. And for all the "don't use facebook then" replies, that's not possible. It's the only option available to be able to communicate with all of my family members on a frequent basis due to some of them being in different countries.

Privacy Settings, Anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Learn to use the privacy settings or go fuck yourself.

Troll? Maybe. Correct? You know I am.

Re:Actually I disagree

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not a link. That's a link to a link. Please label properly next time!

Billions of dollars are being made off your info

[digitaldc]

It's a pain to turn off all the default features that facebook conveniently opts-in for you. By WHY should we have to?

To turn it off

[Anonymous Coward]

You can turn it off in the registry:
HKEY_FACEBOOK\Erxyngf
Clear bit #7 at byte offset 976 in the REG_BINARY value Ftavggrf.
Reboot your face browser.

Re:To turn it off

[Anonymous Coward]

Why bother.
Just click here and it will be turned off permanently.

Some of us are not on Facebook

[betterunixthanunix]

You could always just not be on Facebook -- that strategy has been working just fine for me. I am still in touch with my family, I am still in touch with my friends, and I still get invited to parties.

And again...

[Conspiracy_Of_Doves]

Again Facebook does something unbelievably stupid and further cements my position that I will never, ever sign up with them.

Diaspora and Appleseeds are going about it the wrong way. We don't need a piece of software to get from them in order to social networking to go public. We need a public spec. A whitepaper that describes the input and output the system should have, so anyone can write their own software that conforms to that specification. And submit it to the W3C.

If they want social networking to be more like email, then that's the way it needs to go.

Re:And again...

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you going on about? Any free networking software is automatically an open standard.

Social networking is an open-ended problem. You're not going to solve it by committee. A small coherent group of smart people are going to solve it and the rest will just build on it from there. Maybe it will be Diaspora, maybe something else. Maybe Facebook will eventually open up their standard.

Re:And again...

[Conspiracy_Of_Doves]

Yeah, we don't want Facebook's standard.

Quit the whining

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are still on Facebook, you are there with full knowledge of what you got yourself into. I am so fucking tired of this "wash me but don't make me wet" attitude.

A step forward

[gmuslera]

Im usually critical to facebook, and how "respectful" is to users, and would be screaming because of this one if werent quitted it a year ago. But the trend in something as big as facebook have a potential.. What if facebook and their "bad according with our culture" privacy measures instead of making a mass exodus of users actually do a big change on the global culture around that? I mean, IS already doing changes in our culture, in most countries (maybe except north korea and a few others), but usually taking the way of lesser resistence, but what about harder to do changes?

Internet is a disruptive technology, is making changes in our civilization and culture, some of them facing resistence (i.e. *AA, patents and copyright groups) and some not. And some popular enough sites (from google to 4chan) are doing its share of changing us. But what if they move us to dangerous waters? Things could get worse than mothers killing their kids because don't let them playing Farmville.

100% dead on

[circletimessquare]

you don't get to post things on the internet, and then complain when people see it on the internet

if you don't want people to see something DON'T POST IT ON THE INTERNET

because the fine level of control you desire: "only this person, at this time, in this context, can see this piece of info" is a nonstarter, because it takes 10x more time and effort to define the context of the info you are sharing than it takes to post the info. there is no better way to completely and utterly destroy the pleasure of a social life than weighing it down with such weighty micromanagement

so just don't post the info! no one is going to micromanage their social lives to the point where no information is leaked in the wrong context, mainly because people aren't machiavellian supergeniuses with omnipotent future sight to know every miniscule fine grain social context in which their information is not being told to someone they didn't want that info told to

the better solution is far simpler: SHUT UP and DON'T POST. or post freely and talk freely, AND GIVE UP YOUR RIGHT TO COMPLAIN ABOUT MISUSE. that's really your only choices

the control you seek starts with your mouth, or your keyboard. blaming facebook is just shifting responsibility and personal accountability away from you when things go wrong because you weren't discreet

Re:100% dead on

[Monkeedude1212]

blaming facebook is just shifting responsibility and personal accountability away from you when things go wrong because you weren't discreet

If only the system works like you described. Like someone said earlier, you have more to worry about from OTHER people's posts than you really do your own. Let's say I make a Facebook page - but I don't enter any information but my name and photo. I don't add any of my friends, I basically be a social outcast and hermit on Facebook.

Facebook still allows people to tag "nothings" in photos, so they can tag me in a photo and I won't get ANY notification because the Tag itself won't like to my page - instead it'll just say my name when they hover over it. A potential employer does some research on me - and they find that I have a facebook account but can't see anything but my picture. They then continue their goolge search and see a random picture someone put up of me with my tag on it and know its me because of the photo.

Damn - all I did was enter my name and a good photo of myself - and my reputation got ruined outside of my control.

Re:100% dead on

[Pojut]

From another post I made in this thread:

1. If you engage in social activity with the kind of people that would post incriminating photos of you, you need to find a different group of friends.

2. If you engage in incriminating activities in a public place where other people can take photos of you, you need to be smarter about where you engage in incriminating activities.

Re:100% dead on

[circletimessquare]

any potential employer or significant other that would judge you so harshly for simply having a life is frankly an employer/ S.O. you don't want to have anything to do with

live your life, and stop worrying so much about micromanaging your public image. us who are well-adjusted simply doesn't care as much as you think we do about pictures of you drunk. its just simple not that big of a deal. the misperception is yours: that anyone cares. we don't care

the internet is what it is: it shows more of our lives, longer, as permanent mementos. adapt to that new reality and accept it, because you can't manage or alter it

anyone who would reject you or fire you based on what the internet contains about you is someone without a level of tolerance you don't want to be involved with in the first place. and if you don't want that behavior of yours made a permanent part of your "internet record", then learn the art of discretion

because this is not about other people, or facebook, or the internet affecting your image in ways you don't want. it's about YOU affecting your image in ways you later regret

you have no one to blame if something is out there you don't want to be out there except yourself. take responsibility for your image. or shift blame onto others, and whine about it, to no effect whatsoever, because you can't do anything about it

Re:100% dead on

[siride]

You say that like it's a widespread problem. I can think of only one occasion in my own life where someone I knew posted something about me that I didn't want public. You can also untag yourself from these things once you find out (which is immediately, since Facebook emails you to tell you, or you could check your photos page to see if you are an in any photos). By the way, this new tool actually could be used to more easily find out what people are posting about you, thus helping your problem even more.

Re:100% dead on

[StuartHankins]

+1 Insightful. Wish I had mod points today.

Having a friend who overshares your content, or someone who wants to cause trouble can cause huge problems. Getting the content taken down can be difficult or impossible. It's only going to get worse as people start to believe this is normal.

Re:100% dead on

[Monkeedude1212]

I never said anything about incriminating.

I'm talking photos at a bar or a party.

Re:100% dead on

[slim]

I never said anything about incriminating.

I'm talking photos at a bar or a party.

Why would you mind people seeing those?

Re:100% dead on

[Pojut]

Semantics? Fine.

Swap instances of "incriminating" in my post with "things you don't want an employer or family member to know about". For example: if you don't want an employer or family member to know you are drinking, don't go to public places whose entire purpose is to provide alcohol.

Or, you could just be "that guy" and /ragequit whenever someone takes a picture of you without your approval.

Re:100% dead on

[Monkeedude1212]

So if I don't want my boss to see me eyes glazed over, drunk, at my own new years eve party - and I can't be "that guy" - theres nothing I can do?

Re:100% dead on

[Anonymous Coward]

Why has it suddenly become "OK" for people to not have any privacy whatsoever on the internet? Not 10 years ago it was perfectly common to be able to post something online and restrict access to only a certain group of people, and no one else would ever see it.

Ever since Facebook came along all of a sudden if you post ANYTHING online you should automatically expect 0 privacy. The idea is ridiculous. Makes me glad I don't have a Creepybook account.

Re:100% dead on

[Pojut]

If it's your own party, what are you doing inviting people stupid enough to take pictures of people that are drunk...and then posting them on Facebook?

This goes back to my "find new friends" point.

Re:100% dead on

[Jiro]

any potential employer or significant other that would judge you so harshly for simply having a life is frankly an employer/ S.O. you don't want to have anything to do with

An employer is someone who gives you a job which provides money you need for food, shelter, and clothes. You may not want to have anything to do with them, but you may like even less not having food, shelter, and clothes. In the real world, people work for asshole employers all the time when the alternative is unemployment.

Re:100% dead on

[gorzek]

Given the number of people that go to bars and parties, I find it highly unlikely an employer would terminate you or consider you unsuitable for employment unless there was something in the images beyond just typical bar/party behavior.

If someone's got a picture of you piss drunk, passed out, lying in a pool of vomit, yeah, I can see how they might consider you a source of potential embarrassment for the company.

If you've just got a beer in your hand and you look like you're having a good time, I find it hard to believe any employer would hold that against you unless they're an insane teetotaler, in which case you don't want to work for them anyway.

I realize you can't control other people taking pictures of you, which is why you should probably avoid doing stupid things around people who will take pictures and post them on Facebook. Save the stupid activities for a close group of friends who know not to publicly post all your stupid exploits.

It's not like you have to avoid living your life. Just have some sense. I think some people have gotten used to the idea of being relatively anonymous in life--that you can go out, act like an idiot around a bunch of strangers, and have no consequences. Well, the world is a lot more connected now and people you think are strangers may not be. A friend of a friend of a friend might take a picture of you doing body shots off a 16-year-old's cleavage, and before long it'll be on Facebook and someone who recognizes you will tag it. The girl in the photo gets tagged and just so happens to be the cousin of your manager's daughter, so she tells her father. A couple days later, you're fired. Solution: don't do the stupid shit in the first place.

Re:100% dead on

[Monkeedude1212]

But by then the damage is already done.

Re:100% dead on

[Pojut]

It's not an invasion of privacy, it's common sense. If you don't want someone to know about an activity, don't do it where people you don't trust can see you doing it. This applies to all walks of life, not just Facebook.

Re:100% dead on

[Pojut]

Dude, seriously. Take some responsability, stop acting like you're all that matters, and use common sense.

If you don't want people knowing about something, don't do it around people you don't trust. If that's not good enough, then don't fucking do it at all..

Re:100% dead on

[circletimessquare]

meaning what exactly?

that an employer's perception of you might get you fired and this carries huge implications? yeah, i think i can comprehend that concept. do you think you are informing me of something that i am not aware of?

make damn sure the internet carries nothing that might get you fired. and if something is out there about you that might effect your employment, why the bleep didn't you make sure that didn't get out there? it's something you can't control, like a friend photographing you and labelling you in the photo? why don't you try picking your friends more carefully, or situations where you might be photogrpahed more carefully, or having more discretion around a camera?

who is to blame but yourself?

this whole issue is a nonissue, it's the same bs as old as time: avoiding responsibility. "i wish to shift blame about the negative consequences of my behavior onto someone or something else"

no: you are your image. take ownership of it and manage it. because of all the heavy implications you are well aware of. lesson number one: discretion and self-control and choosing your friends and social situations where you let loose wisely

Re:100% dead on

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats got nothing to do with my point. My point is, "Why has it suddenly become OK for people to not have any privacy whatsoever on the internet?"

Being able to effectively stalk people by using Facebook is an invasion of privacy, especially with no way to turn it off. Granted it possible to stalk before, but they are making it so easy anyone can do it. A task that would take hours or days (depending on the amount of data) can now be completed in seconds.

Re:100% dead on

[AltairDusk]

The trouble is that some idiotic employers think activities which are perfectly normal to do in public and have nothing to do with work or how that person will perform at work should be used to judge the employability of a potential hire.

Re:100% dead on

[Pojut]

::shrug:: It's a natural by-product of everyone being connected. Doesn't make it right, it's just the way it is.

That being said, it's quite possible to lock your Facebook down tight, to the point where short of figuring out your password or fooling you into thinking they're someone they aren't, no "outsider" would have access to anything you do. You can even make it where they can't even see your profile picture.

Still, if you're the kind of person that has problems with a stalker, what are you doing on a site like Facebook?

Re:100% dead on

[GeckoX]

You know, once upon a time a person could make a mistake or do something they regretted that would be forgotten and never become an issue. You really want that pic that some 'friend' took at a college party and posted tagged with your name to still pop up on searches when you're 40 something looking for a new job?

Is it no longer OK to make mistakes and have them forgotten?

The number of posts in this thread that are basically saying 'be perfect all the time and you'll have nothing to worry about, or else suck up the consequences' is absolutely shocking.

Sure, if _I_ choose to post something online about myself then I will live with the consequences of doing so. But that is not what this is about. Not even a little bit. (Is it just me or is this thread getting very Orwellian?)

Problem here specifically is that there is this online social community out there that a ton of people use. A lot of people carry out all forms of conversations on it. Sometimes two people will even have a conversation between themselves discussing someone else with the intent that the someone else won't be able to see it, at least that's the way it was the other day when they had the conversation. Now lo and behold, for example, your SO knows all about the exciting trip you have planned as a surprise for the weekend! (See, doesn't have to be about getting fired over some drunken party pic now does it?)

Kids today, so used to their freedoms being given away by the powers that be that they take it for the norm and now are totally willing, or worse, expect that, privacy is to be given away or be non existent as well!

Anyways, for my own self, just another tick on the reasons not to Facebook list.

Re:100% dead on

[gfreeman]

Facebook still allows people to tag "nothings" in photos, so they can tag me in a photo and I won't get ANY notification because the Tag itself won't like to my page - instead it'll just say my name when they hover over it.

It could also say "Donald Duck". That name has no connection to you at all, other than someone else has typed it in. As you say, NO LINK.

A potential employer does some research on me - and they find that I have a facebook account but can't see anything but my picture. They then continue their goolge search and see a random picture someone put up of me with my tag on it and know its me because of the photo.

Damn - all I did was enter my name and a good photo of myself - and my reputation got ruined outside of my control.

If your reputation can be destroyed as simply as that, then you have hardly any reputation at all. What the hell is your resume like that a potential employer will blow you off because of an unlinked and therefore unsubstantiated photo of you on the internet doing something innocuous? As said countless times by countless other people here, if there are photos that bad of you posted by your friends - get new friends. If a potential employer won't hire you because of a single photo that may not even be of you - then why would you work for them, they are obviously a bunch of evil twats.

Chill.

Re:100% dead on

[Monkeedude1212]

I am using common sense - I'm sure there must be at least ONE piece of information about you that you wished wasn't public. A letter you wrote. A picture or video taken of you. Any kind of record. Not necessarily something you regret but still not something you want everyone to know. Something possibly 1, 5, or 10 years old now. And it doesn't bug you that it can be made public without your permission?

Re:100% dead on

[circletimessquare]

so much fuss over nothing

everyone has skeletons in their closet. you still have to hunt them down to find them about someone else on the internet, even without the false premise that you couldn't find them before the internet (you could)

and you also have the fact that everyone else's skeletons are equally findable. its the new normal. and maybe the new normal is better, because there is nothing to be ashamed of when everyone is supposed to somehow be ashamed of the same thing for some reason no one can put their finger on anymore

more succinctly: that evil significant other or that evil employer can't hold your drunk photos against you when they also have drunk photos out there too

Re:100% dead on

[lgw]

Why would you mind people seeing those?

Because not everyone has the same values as you and your friends. I know that may come as a shocker, but different people have different deeply-held beliefs about what is moral and what is not. You may not even know what your employer (or potantial employer) considers deeply wrong/offensive until it's too late.

I keep my private and professional lives as separate as I an. That includes not having a Facebok account, and never posting anything, really, under my own name on the internet. There's just no need for it.

Re:100% dead on

[Godskitchen]

post1: "live your life, and stop worrying so much about micromanaging your public image."

post2: "you are your image. take ownership of it and manage it"

Thank you for this glut of conflicting, meaningless and poorly-punctuated drivel. Your black and white statement indicating that if an employer fires you over compromising pictures, then you shouldn't be working for that employer in the first place are ridiculous. Sometimes people have to deal with their employers whims in order to earn money to provide for their families and themselves. If that means micromanaging your online persona, so be it.

Re:100% dead on

[Pojut]

I know it's going to sound like I'm being a dick, but I'm truly not.

There is nothing like you've described. As I said before, I've been careful my whole life to make sure that anything I don't want anyone knowing about or seeing can't be known about or seen. Anything I've done that could possibly compromise me professionally or personally has only been done in the presence of others who share the same concern (or by myself.)

I understand where you're coming from, I really do...but it's not nearly as difficult as you make it out to be. So long as you are aware of what you do and where you do it, you'll have no problems.

Re:100% dead on

[circletimessquare]

there's no conflict in my statements. both are poised against a third choice: don't blame others for the info out there about you

you can ignore the info out there about you, or you can take responsibility for it

that's my point, and i've stated it consistently. try to keep up

Re:100% dead on

[Anonymous Coward]

anyone who would reject you or fire you based on what the internet contains about you is someone without a level of tolerance you don't want to be involved with in the first place.

Except for the part where he hands me my paycheck.
It'd be lovely if my boss and his boss, and the top-boss were well-adjusted tolerant people. I've lead a more or less squeaky clean life, and I'm not ashamed of anything out there. Unfortunately, if the boss ever poked around and found some of this stuff, then he would hound me for it. My career here would be ended, and I'd be demonized just like the guy I replaced.

And it'd be great, really truly life-freeingly great if I could find a job with that kind of boss. I thought I was a shoe-in for a job across town, but they went with someone else. I'm not really sure why. A part of me is afraid it's because you can google my name and find me at a political rally and dressed up for Halloween. Innocent stuff, but not the sort of thing you bring into work. In a word: Unprofessional. And so I'm afraid to, well, put it all out there and contribute to the Internet more then I do. And with shit like this I'm afraid even that won't be enough.

Re:100% dead on

[Pojut]

Then don't work for that company.

Seriously. If they bitch about the fact that there's a picture from 20 years ago of you holding a beer while at a baseball game, you don't want anything to do with that employer. I guarantee you they will be a pain in the ass to work for, and not worth the trouble.

Re:100% dead on

[Khashishi]

It could be argued that that is less a problem with Facebook and more a problem with humans. After all, I could make a website called Monkeedudesucksdonkeydicks.com, and someone searching for you might find that site. I don't even need the internet to post libelous stuff about you.

Re:100% dead on

[Anonymous Coward]

once again, we have a classic circletimessquare fountain of idiocy. Those high and mighty ideals you are preaching ("you shouldn't want to have a job at a place that monitors you like this" or "you shouldn't want to have a significant other who monitors you like this") sound wonderful from your digital haven, but don't work in the real world. Platitudes don't pay the bills, and saying "I deserve to work in a place that doesn't care about this stuff" doesn't change the fact that you are unemployed in a particularly tough job market. Platitudes don't prevent the emotional pain of losing someone you care about, even if it is over something trivial and stupid.

finally, it's hilarious that you both say "learn discretion" and "you shouldn't tolerate people who won't let you live your life." You don't get to have it both ways, moron. We live in a digital age where your activities can be monitored and uploaded to the internet. But it is great to hear that you are with Zuckerman and all his other cronies who think that we don't deserve privacy - it just gives me one more reason to disregard your opinions.

Re:100% dead on

[imthesponge]

Beggars can't be choosers.

Re:100% dead on

[Nyder]

blaming facebook is just shifting responsibility and personal accountability away from you when things go wrong because you weren't discreet

If only the system works like you described. Like someone said earlier, you have more to worry about from OTHER people's posts than you really do your own. Let's say I make a Facebook page - but I don't enter any information but my name and photo. I don't add any of my friends, I basically be a social outcast and hermit on Facebook.

Facebook still allows people to tag "nothings" in photos, so they can tag me in a photo and I won't get ANY notification because the Tag itself won't like to my page - instead it'll just say my name when they hover over it. A potential employer does some research on me - and they find that I have a facebook account but can't see anything but my picture. They then continue their goolge search and see a random picture someone put up of me with my tag on it and know its me because of the photo.

Damn - all I did was enter my name and a good photo of myself - and my reputation got ruined outside of my control.

Replace your "good" photo with a picture of your cat. Now they have nothing to compare that it's really you.

Re:100% dead on

[clone53421]

It also makes it impossible for your real friends to find you. You might as well just not have Facebook.

Re:100% dead on

[Homburg]

Not 10 years ago it was perfectly common to be able to post something online and restrict access to only a certain group of people, and no one else would ever see it.

Well, you can still do that with Facebook, so nothing's changed.

Re:100% dead on

[RocketRabbit]

It seems that you don't really understand what is going on here. A person you who isn't your Facebook friend can take a picture of you at a strip club (or whatever) and post it on their Facebook, and tag you in the photo.

Then your morally superior boss can look at the photo and fire you.

It's not really difficult to understand why people are pissed off at Facebook.

Re:100% dead on

[caitsith01]

blaming facebook is just shifting responsibility and personal accountability away from you when things go wrong because you weren't discreet

If only the system works like you described. Like someone said earlier, you have more to worry about from OTHER people's posts than you really do your own. Let's say I make a Facebook page - but I don't enter any information but my name and photo. I don't add any of my friends, I basically be a social outcast and hermit on Facebook.

Facebook still allows people to tag "nothings" in photos, so they can tag me in a photo and I won't get ANY notification because the Tag itself won't like to my page - instead it'll just say my name when they hover over it. A potential employer does some research on me - and they find that I have a facebook account but can't see anything but my picture. They then continue their goolge search and see a random picture someone put up of me with my tag on it and know its me because of the photo.

Damn - all I did was enter my name and a good photo of myself - and my reputation got ruined outside of my control.

Do you actually USE Facebook?

1. You DO get notified if someone tags you in a photo.

2. You can un-tag yourself from a photo and IIRC FB then won't allow anyone to re-tag you in that photo thereafter.

3. You can limit the information that random strangers can obtain about you, including finding photos in which you are tagged.

4. If none of the above does the trick, you have avenues of complaint to FB to get offensive material removed.

Re:100% dead on

[caitsith01]

Sure, if _I_ choose to post something online about myself then I will live with the consequences of doing so. But that is not what this is about. Not even a little bit. (Is it just me or is this thread getting very Orwellian?)

Problem here specifically is that there is this online social community out there that a ton of people use. A lot of people carry out all forms of conversations on it. Sometimes two people will even have a conversation between themselves discussing someone else with the intent that the someone else won't be able to see it, at least that's the way it was the other day when they had the conversation. Now lo and behold, for example, your SO knows all about the exciting trip you have planned as a surprise for the weekend! (See, doesn't have to be about getting fired over some drunken party pic now does it?)

The problem with this is that you're wrong about what can and cannot be seen by others on FB. If you want to have a private "conversation", you can do that and no-one other than the two of you (or anyone either of you forwards the information on to) can ever see it. In Facebook this is what "messages" are, rather than "wall posts". Even better, you can use email, SMS or a telephone if you wish to improve the protection of your privacy.

If your conversation about your surprise weekend couldn't be seen by your SO last week, it can't be seen this week.

All that this new tool does is expose information that is already exposed to others in a summary way. Other people could already find all of this information by trawling through, for example, your FB wall for the past three years to see every message between you and Mr/Ms X. This tool simply does that task for them, so they can just click a "show me everything public between GeckoX and Mr/Ms X" button.

Facebook calls it a "wall" for a reason - it's like a semi-public noticeboard where things that are posted can be seen by more than just the owner of the wall and the person posting it. At minimum it's like a noticeboard on a wall in your house - other friends and acquaintances who come in can see what's on your wall. Depending on your settings and who you choose to befriend, it might be more like a wall at your workplace or in a public place.

Re:100% dead on

[clone53421]

GP’s complaint was that someone can still tag you without linking to your profile, and if the image is public, anyone can see it. All they have to do is type your name and then un-check the box next to your profile link in the search results list.

You are not notified, you cannot un-tag yourself, you cannot search to find photos in which you’ve been tagged in this manner, and you cannot prevent random strangers from seeing it.

Re:100% dead on

[clone53421]

It seems that you don't really understand what is going on here. A person you who isn't your Facebook friend can take a picture of you at a strip club (or whatever) and post it on their Facebook, and tag you in the photo.

Then your morally superior boss can look at the photo and fire you.

It's really difficult to understand why people are pissed off at Facebook.

FTFY.

Re:100% dead on

[caitsith01]

GP’s complaint was that someone can still tag you without linking to your profile, and if the image is public, anyone can see it. All they have to do is type your name and then un-check the box next to your profile link in the search results list.

You are not notified, you cannot un-tag yourself, you cannot search to find photos in which you’ve been tagged in this manner, and you cannot prevent random strangers from seeing it.

If this is the complaint, then it is no different to publication of such a photo anywhere on the web. There is nothing about putting up a named photo of someone on a web page which is unique to Facebook.

Also, if it's not linked to your profile the extent of the exposure to people you know will be very limited.

Re:100% dead on

[clone53421]

it is no different to publication of such a photo anywhere on the web. There is nothing about putting up a named photo of someone on a web page which is unique to Facebook

I don’t disagree. I was just explaining his point.

Facebook=FBI Honeypot?

[elucido]

It's starting to look that way.

Re:Reasoning Re:Nonissue

[lxs]

I disagree. You should still have done it, just get over your shame. Hatera are jealous because they never get invited to orgies involving transvestite strippers and rottweilers.

Time to sign up

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly what I'm been waiting for; more interesting ways to find out about trivial and mildly interesting things that people I barely know are doing and for them to do the same to me. See you on FB, guys.

Signed,

The last man on Earth not (quite yet) on Facebook

Re:"there's currently no obvious way to turn it of

[mrxak]

Hehe. From the very beginning, I used Facebook only for stalking my friends. I have only the barest minimum of contact information on my profile, and nothing else. And the people I don't want to share my barest minimum of contact information with? I don't friend them, whee!

  I for one, love any new features that let me stalk people easier. People who are concerned about this sort of thing lost all their privacy years ago anyway, because they're dumb.

Remember Wall to Wall?

[rakuen]

Remember when Facebook used to have a Wall to Wall feature? You know, you'd be able to click on someone's post on your wall, and then you'd see every wall post either of you had ever made to each other. I'm pretty sure you could use it on two friends, but this was a while ago and I can't quite remember. I also believe they removed the feature when they added comments on wall posts. If they didn't they sure hid it from me.

Now we have the See Friendship tool. It does... the same thing, pretty much, perhaps a little more extensively. Essentially you're all complaining about Facebook adding a feature they removed earlier out of redundancy. Do you have a right to complain? Yeah, of course you do. However, if you were fine with that feature before, don't you think it's a little hypocritical to criticize Facebook for putting it back in now, just because it's shiny and "new"?

Re:Remember Wall to Wall?

[Anonymous Coward]

This was exactly my first thought. This isn't anything new. In fact, it's an old feature that had been removed, reborn.

Re:Remember Wall to Wall?

[hellkyng]

You are correct sir, I recall the very feature you describe. I don't understand what all the fuss is about, facebook has had stalkers since day one. Some new feature isn't gonna change that overly much. If your concern with Facebook is creepy stalkers I encourage you to avoid the internet in general.

Re:Remember Wall to Wall?

[skiman1979]

They didn't remove the wall-to-wall feature. Click a friend's name, load their profile. Just below the text box where you'd type out a message to post on their wall, there's a "filters" link (below the Share button). Click that. Then click wall-to-wall.

Now if you want to see a wall to wall between friend1 and friend2, you can copy/paste friend1 and friend2's ID numbers into the URL.

I only noticed this after reading your post and tried it to verify. So the ability is already there to see friend1 and friend2's "life story" between each other. This new tool just automates it so you don't have to paste IDs into the URL.

Hasn't anyone at FB ever heard of Beta Testing?

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess Zuckerberg was sick on the day they taught the software development lifecycle.

Re:Reasoning Re:Nonissue

[mcvos]

You don't mind if details of your sexual encounters were shared with all your friends and family?

Great!

[nasalicio]

Sounds great, where can I sign up? Oh wait...

No surprise there

[Drakkenmensch]

Facebook implements a new feature and within seconds is turned into a glaring privacy violation tool. The silence of no one being surprised is positively defeaning.

/. Is A Creeper

[piffey]

Creepy, creepy /.

Re:"there's currently no obvious way to turn it of

[Cederic]

. It's the only option available to be able to communicate with all of my family members on a frequent basis due to some of them being in different countries.

Which is clearly utter bullshit.

Use email. Use online forums. Use the phone. Use a fucking boat, your legs and your physical presence.

There have never in human history been a broader set of options and opportunities to communicate with geographically dispersed people, so pretending you absolutely must use Facebook or you'll be cut off forever (and lose your inheritance) stands out as being the complete tosh it clearly is.

Wall to Wall?

[edmicman]

Hasn't this been around the whole time as "Wall to Wall"? I remember there used to be links where you could see a "Wall to Wall" conversation between yourself and your friends, and you could change the PID in the URL to other mutual friends and see conversations between them. I envisioned making an app to basically do the same with an interface....I thought it would help in searching for conversations. There currently is no good search tool for stuff on facebook as far as I know. For example, I'll remember having someone post a link to me, or mentioning something in a comment but I have no way of finding that. If I could view all of the history between them and myself, I could at least ctrl-f for it.

Good to see Facebook making this easier!

Re:Wall to Wall?

[rakuen]

I actually mentioned this just a couple threads up, but I might be below your reading threshold. I agree with you on this one, and that's exactly how I used the Wall to Wall tool before. I would remember I wanted to look at something a friend posted to me in the past, but I didn't want to have to scour the timeline for it. Since I knew who gave it to me, I could just Wall to Wall and there it is! Facebook's interface is optimized for "present" browsing, and it has very little support for "past" browsing. Honestly, just a search box that shows up for you on your own profile would be amazing.

Re:Wall to Wall?

[koick]

Now *this* is one on my complaints against Facebook. It seems they actively encourage throwaway comments. If it's not easy to go back and search for a link/comment/post/etc., then why bother with anything of any importance as it's not effectively archived...

Re:"there's currently no obvious way to turn it of

[somersault]

You can't block people from seeing what you comment about on other people's walls without preventing people from commenting on your own wall.

Actually I completely agree about that being annoying. The way the privacy settings are worded is rather poor. I thought I had simply disabled people from seeing my posts to friends' walls (ie the friends that they aren't friends with), but I think it just disabled people from being able to post on my wall.

You could create a private group for only your family and post all your pics etc up there?

By default...

[hesaigo999ca]

I think this should be enabled by default on all friends, and then take time to configure it
for those whom you do not want this to be on, I think would be the safest bet.

Cool

[Anonymous Coward]

Cool, a facebook bashing thread. I thought I was going to have to go a day on slashdot without one.

Re:Cool

[Anonymous Coward]

It is not a "bash facebook" story. It is a discussion about Facebook and a potential privacy concern. The amount of pro Facebook and anti Facebook posts are directly proportional to the opinions of the people posting those comments and more a reflection of the overall feelings of the average slashdot reader. If a majority of the comments migrate towards an overall feeling of negative towards Facebook, most people leaving comments are not happy with Facebook, if the comments reflect an overall positive feeling towards Facebook, then the opposite. Is that concept really hard for you to understand? If you feel there is too much Facebook bashing going on here, defend your position, state your opinion, and tell people why, being a pussy and complaining about it as an AC is useless.

Re:Billions of dollars are being made off your inf

[Tim C]

Billions of dollars are not being made off my info. If they're extremely lucky, just enough money is being made off my info to pay for the service.

Given the aggressive AdblockPlus settings and Greasemonkey scripts I have, they sure as hell aren't making much in advertising.

Guess what? Shit ain't free! Don't like it, stfu and don't use it.

Re:"there's currently no obvious way to turn it of

[hodet]

So, you monitor your mom from her basement?

Re:Billions of dollars are being made off your inf

[Fusen]

Because you're using their service and they get to choose how the default state is? Don't whine about something you're voluntarily using and have the option to stop immediately.

Re:Billions of dollars are being made off your inf

[slim]

It's a pain to turn off all the default features that facebook conveniently opts-in for you. By WHY should we have to?

Because Facebook is *for* sharing information. The less you share, the less useful it is. Yes, I am interested in photographs taken of my friends by friends of theirs that I haven't met. Yes, I'm happy for them to see similar photos of me. Yes, I want to converse in comment threads with friends-of-friends.

If the default FB privacy settings were very tight, most people would not find the site useful. Not enough people would delve into the settings and open them up. Most people would try it, find little of interest, and never visit again.

It's the openness that attracts people to the site.

Re:"there's currently no obvious way to turn it of

[somersault]

People who are concerned about this sort of thing lost all their privacy years ago anyway, because they're dumb.

I think you have just hit the nail on the head. The thing that's been annoying me whenever people whine about this stuff, yet they are the ones who have shared all this information in the first place, and continue to do so, then get affronted when everyone else can see it. I find it really hard to put into words sometimes how stupid it all is, but you have said it perfectly.

I've even traced the life story of an AC on Slashdot (who jeered my "easily trackable" Slashdot account, despite me not using this nick anywhere else) just by using the initials they signed at the bottom of their AC posts..

its a different issue than you think it is

[Anonymous Coward]

Data aggregation attacks http://books.google.com/books?id=Y9sCjLBKtzgC&pg=PA258&lpg=PA258&dq=classified+data+aggregation&source=bl&ots=bJ55DKAE7w&sig=s53j8mXqwAYQFH4-IJA1SgyYDgY&hl=en&ei=leDKTPHCGoT68AbZr6nHAQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CCMQ6AEwAjgU#v=onepage&q=classified%20data%20aggregation&f=false are a genuine threat and one of the reasons the military objects to Wikileaks release of classified documents which per document contain no information that would appear to merit being classified. (grr, the civilian population was a lot better educated about the existence of aggregation attacks when we were fighting in WW I and WW II).

The issue here is not that Facebook has automated aggregation of the data you have permission to access. The real issue is that Facebook does not provide the ability (or makes it functionally inaccessible) to apply proper, fine-grained, access permissions to the data you share with any one person.

Re:Actually I disagree

[Anonymous Coward]

Why bother....
Getting real time stats on how well the trap works is double the fun.
20 clicks so far...

"Stalker tool"?

[Beerdood]

Oh come on now, Facebook has always been a stalker's paradise. A stalker will meticulously look at someone's profile anyway - how does this help them? They're gonna see everything their "stalkee" posts already.

This only really a helps stalkers stalking multiple people - that way they can see all the juicy details both stalkees are saying to each other

HA-ha-ha-ha-haha-hahahaha-haha-hahahaha, NO !

[Gr333d]

HA-ha-ha-ha-haha-hahahaha-haha-hahahaha, NO !

Anthropic principle:

[SigmundFloyd]

If Facebook users didn't deserve this, they wouldn't be using Facebook.

facebook == echelon

[smellsofbikes]

As one of my friends likes to say, changing the name Echelon to Facebook was the most successful rebranding exercise ever.

So nostalgic

[countertrolling]

I remember when everybody started yelling when the phone books were first being put onto CD-ROMs

Re:Reasoning Re:Nonissue

[Stooshie]

Hey this is slashdot. I bet most sexual encounters are with their family.

Things like this will eventually kill Facebook

[assertation]

Things like this will eventually kill Facebook.

Probably everyone knows by now that it is not a good idea to post that picture of yourself in a dress at the Halloween party, but even innocent things can come back to bite you in the ass. I remember reading one story about a woman who was denied disability for extreme clinical depression because someone searched Facebook and found a picture of her with a smile on her face at a beach.

Facebook is the first stop after Google for HR people. It is possible to make many innocent comments or jokes that an HR person may not like and decide to see that you never get the job.

There is that much snooping going on. I knew a woman who was doing amateur beauty contest/modeling pictures. She never mentioned the name of her company at all on the web sites where she appeared. She never mentioned those web sites at work. Yet, somebody found those sites and gave her an ultimatum.

Re:Things like this will eventually kill Facebook

[countSudoku()]

Probably not though, look at all the people who think Sarah Palin is an excellent public servant and ready to lead our cuntry to grateness! THOSE same asswipes think facebook is AWESOME and can't wait for all the new sharing features to be set upon them. That said:

innocent comments or jokes

...must not be safe for the Internet anymore. Then again, I would never want to work for a place that uses spurious info as some sort of track record for sanity. They already sound like raving shitheads, and I've not even interviewed there yet!

Re:Things like this will eventually kill Facebook

[slim]

Facebook is the first stop after Google for HR people. It is possible to make many innocent comments or jokes that an HR person may not like and decide to see that you never get the job.

Even with the default settings, I don't think an arbitrary person can see your comments or jokes. This HR person would need to get you to add her, or, for a more limited view of you, get added by a mutual friend. That seems like quite a stretch.

Of course, you can set it up so that anyone can see everything about you -- but that would be your choice.

Its actually worst then that

[Anonymous Coward]

I did a search for someone earlier and saw wall posts between friends and non-friends (who had similar names as the search term) show up in the listing.

Question: Would open source Diaspora solve this?

[postermmxvicom]

Answer: No. So what are we whining about, exactly?

Re:"there's currently no obvious way to turn it of

[Anonymous Coward]

So, Lone Star, now you see that Facebook will always triumph because good is dumb.

What?

[canajin56]

Google is awesome for letting people search the web. Facebook is ultimate evil for letting you search Facebook. If you posted information publically, that all your facebook friends can read...in what way did you have an expectation that your facebook friends wouldn't read it? Were you hoping it would get lost in the flood of bullshit and nobody would read it? Really? You were relying on signal:noise ratio for privacy, rather than actually sending a PM? That's beyond absurd.

Re:Reasoning Re:Nonissue

[node 3]

And if do or say anything that you are ashamed for(or will be ashamed for in some years), you should not have done it in the first place.

What a horrific waste of the handful of decades were are granted in this world such a mindset would lead to!

Joe Garellee:

[Anonymous Coward]

"You can't take something 'off' the internet, its like trying to get pee out of a pool, once its in there its in there."

eh

[shadowrat]

facebook is a creepy public place and this is par for the course. anyone who thinks they are doing anything in secret is mistaken. What i want to know is why it's so easy to do this, but a simple search to let me find my own posts by date or content doesn't exist?

Re:Reasoning Re:Nonissue

[leuk_he]

the last line of my post should have been a giveaway that this was meant sarcastically, but you and a moderator thought otherwise.... ;)

Old Reading Rainbow Leadin

[Anonymous Coward]

Everything about you,
and your whole family too

Take a look, it's on facebook,
I'm reading your facebooks

I am a stalker! Your friends, I know, and where you go,
It's all on facebook

I can see anything!
Your life history, isn't a mystery, when it's on facebook

It's all on facebook, I'm reading your facebooks,

Need a HOWTO

[goodmanj]

Okay, this sounds terrible in the article, but I can't see how bad it is until I see it in action. But because facebook has NO DOCUMENTATION TO SPEAK OF, I can't figure out how to do it. Even the cheerily sinister official announcement spends the whole time talking about how great the friend stalker tool is, but gives zero information on how to find and use it.

Anybody know what buttons to push?

seriously?

[eyeareque]

Facebook adds a stalker too? Seriously? apparently someone didn't get the memo.. Facebook is one huge stalker tool to begin with.

Re:Reasoning Re:Nonissue

[Surt]

Probably only Americans care. Legacy of puritanism. Root out your ineffective memes.

Political Donations

[koick]

I feel exactly the same way about political donations. Yeah it's public knowledge, but it shouldn't be so easy as putting my name into a Google search.

Re:Political Donations

[kd5zex]

but it shouldn't be so easy as putting my name into a Google search.

Why not?

Re:Political Donations

[Anonymous Coward]

A potential future employer shouldn't be able to so easily see a person's political affiliation - it's not really any of their business. But how can they miss it if it's one of the top hits on a name search? I'd be willing to guess that the US is one of the very few countries which allows such ease into this borderline privacy issue.

Re:Political Donations

[kd5zex]

I suppose that's a good point. But what should the requirements be in order to obtain the information? A $1000 subscription? 3 backflips?

The information is in the public domain to expose the "people" donating in order for the public to scrutinize the association. I would argue that impeding access to this information would compound the problems we already have.

What I really want

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd prefer if there were something like this for twitter. Or at least some way to interleave two feeds chronologically.

Supersocial == Antisocial

[rsborg]

Being "Social" means respecting other's boundaries while interacting with them.

A site which breaks down those boundaries to the point of discomfort of it's users is bordering anti-social.

Not surprising given it's founder's attitude.

That would be a charity... not an employment.

[denzacar]

An employer is someone who gives you a job which provides money you need for food, shelter, and clothes.

And you "provide" work from which your employer derives a profit, but that doesn't really count as providing cause you are not the one giving money and there are plenty people like you or better BEGGING for a job like that.

BULLSHIT!

You WORK for your PAY so you could "provide" for YOU AND YOUR FAMILY.
Your employer does diddly-squat in that relationship unless there is money in it FOR HIM, through direct or indirect profit.

Re:Billions of dollars are being made off your inf

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it's a private business, not a public commodity.

Is there any more doubt

[Compaqt]

that new Facebook features are written simply by some kind of weird combination of /dev/random and http://www.php.net/manual/en/ with the noise being supplied by a 1000 monkeys?

Privacy on the Internet?...

[skiman1979]

If you don't want something seen on the front page of the newspaper, don't post it online.

I think as long as this tool abides by the privacy settings on your Facebook account, it should be ok. If you don't want people seeing your communications on Facebook, why have them as a friend? Or put them in a group that doesn't have access to certain areas. If you want communication between you and another friend to be private, use a more private means of communication. Secret posts to your mistress don't belong on a Facebook wall post.

The information this tool makes available is already available anyway. If you're concerned about one of your Facebook friends having access to all of that information, why not just remove them as a friend?

Enough

[Anonymous Coward]

Diaspora, hasten to our rescue.

Would you give a thief your wallet?

[overnight_failure]

I've said for a long time that anyone who uses facebook gets exactly what they deserve.

Creepy

[tgibbs]

Isn't there something a bit creepy about people who are disturbed by making it more convenient to see information that their friends have already decided to share with them?

Re:Reasoning Re:Nonissue

[treeves]

Hey this is slashdot. I bet most sexual encounters are with their electronic devices.

FTFY.

Re:Billions of dollars are being made off your inf

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a pain to turn off all the default features that facebook conveniently opts-in for you. By WHY should we have to?

Because you want to use a free service supplied by a commercial entity.

Consider credit cards with X days interest free. How can they do it and be profitable? Simply because most people won't be disciplined enough to pay on time. If you make some default behaviour that alerts people so they are more likely to pay on time, you won't improve the service, you will eliminate it. If too many people pay on time the service will no longer be offered.

Facebook et al are designed to harvest information for profit. You can refuse to use it and give them nothing, you can be disciplined about your settings to guard what you give, or you can be undisciplined and give info without thought. It is people in the third group that provide the profitability that allows the service to be offered at no charge.

Noise? Signal? Meh.

[kokoba]

I am not really all that worried about the (lack) of privacy of Facebook all that much. (Selling out my info to corporate shills is another matter entirely; if anyone's going to make a profit off of me, I want it to be *me*). As more and more people are born into the "Facebook generation" and as they age and find careers and start running the world, this kind of stuff won't be all that important because nearly everyone will have this kind of documentation about them available in one form or another. It's just all that much more noise to process, without a whole lot of signal.