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Facebook Makes Privacy Settings More Obvious
CWmike writes "Facebook is making a series of design changes to the site to make it clearer to users who can see the content that they post, an issue Google has been criticizing Facebook about since it launched its own social network, Google+, in June. 'You have told us that "who can see this?" could be clearer across Facebook, so we have made changes to make this more visual and straightforward,' Facebook said in a blog post on Tuesday. The main change is that Facebook will now display the intended audience for a photo, a text post, a tag or any other piece of content right next to it. Until now, those controls have been on a separate Settings section of the profile. 'Your profile should feel like your home on the web — you should never feel like stuff appears there that you don't want, and you should never wonder who sees what's there.' Another change Facebook is introducing is allowing users to modify the audience of a post after it's published, which they couldn't do before."
Is it me, or both Google and Facebook copying each other. G+ has animated GIFs, now Facebook has etc. Now this.
Your profile should feel like your home on the web
Um, no. A Facebook profile feels like a cheap apartment. They all look the same, feel the same, and even smell the same (okay, that last one, I don't know what I'm talking about.)
A personal website, on the other hand, now THAT feels like my home on the Web.
I've never tried to stuff a cat back into a bag, but I suppose it had to get there somehow in the first place.
I guess as long as no one has seen it while out of the bag then you're okay.
I do wonder what this'll mean for replies to posts. I never signed up for facebook, but it was a fun prank on IPB forums to delete posts when it made a reply look naughty or silly.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
On G+ you can reply to Game events and it stays defaulted to the Game Circle you created for the Game App.
On FB it's hard to do that.
Now at least it's possible - plus no more of those tracking apps that "list your friends" in a "picture" to grab your data.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
It's amazing what a little competition will do for your motivation.
So long as they keep changing the settings for you, who cares how clear they are? The issue is not how "obvious" the security settings are, its that facebook has a history of changing them without notice and exposing users information.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Don't they reset privacy setting every once in a while or something like that? I don't pay them a lot of attention.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Too little, too late.
"Another change Facebook is introducing is allowing users to modify the audience of a post after it's published, which they couldn't do before."
Finally. Why did this have to take so long to implement? I was considering deleting all posts I made that were viewable by everyone to clean up my profile for future job interviews. Luckily now I don't have to.
It only took them seven years to make these changes, too. And what a coincidence that they roll these out right after G+ launches with these features out of the gate.
In terms of privacy, their problem is not a lack of features. Their problem is trust. And after years and years of hard work to make me never trust them they have succeeded. New privacy features just can't fix that. Too little, too late
I wonder if this has anything to do with the reported exodus of users (especially in North America)? Or competition from Google+?
As in, "It is OBVIOUS that you've been HAD!" ;-)
You are, as always, private from each other, but not from Facebook, nor private in any meaningful sense from those with whom Facebook does business.
Just say, "No, I'm not on Facebook."
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
The discoverability of these features is almost as important as their existence.
In place privacy controls let people make informed choices about what gets shared instead of having to correlate unclear descriptions from privacy settings page with the GUI and layout they're familiar with.
Previously, I bet Facebook was betting that the difficulty of implementing privacy settings as user intended would be enough to have them choose the defaults thinking that increased access to their content by friends, and the net total increase in accessibility to people's information, would keep users engaged.
They'd think that those users who would choose not use the network as a result or to lock their pages down into being mere mugshots wouldn't be useful to growing out Facebook, anyway.
Hey, how's it going?
The only difference with Google+ is that Google is the ad agency. And if they kick you off, then you lose access to everything related to your account.
Google is demanding your full, legal name. They want you to join Gmail so that they can sell you ads by scanning your email. All of that goes along with the pretty picture that is painted by your Google searches.
I hate Facebook, but at least I do not have Facebook email or Facebook search, ignoring the Like buttons all over the place analogous to Google Analytics. I draw the line with Google at Gmail. I cannot keep getting deeper and deeper entrenched with any single company, especially when the potential of being banned, for any reason, has a lot of other potential side effects.
As long as Facebook keeps its borders intact, and no other independent player pops up, then I will likely be stuck on Facebook and not on Google+.
50% left turn here.
Why didn't AOL slam dunk this back in the day when the Web was fresh and new? (cue Sunset Boulevard theme music).
Facebook consists of a profile and some, what, 30 games? No chat rooms? No affiliate stuff?
Why did we decide ten years later we pined to look at profiles?
It even had Meg Ryan.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Mature.
I don't trust ... them ... that's why I constantly do what I can to destroy them.
Naive. You don't trust them, and yet by attempting to destroy them* you give up all that precious anonymity. You should read Hercule Poirot and get even more paranoid.
* or so you claim. Talk is cheap.
Google+ lets you specify which circles to share each post with. That's fine. Except that you don't share with circles, you share with people. This is a big difference, and a big problem.
Let me explain.
When you share something and say which circles to share it with, Google converts that into a list of all the people in those circles. This is all good and fine as long as your circles don't change. But suppose my mother joins, and I add her to my Family circle. I would expect her to be able to see photos that I've previously shared with my Family circle. No such luck. And suppose I realize that someone shouldn't be in a circle, I can remove them from the circle, but I can't stop them from seeing that post I just shared with that circle without removing the post.
Google needs to fix this so that posts are shared with circles, not people.
Yay, something useful. And something I'd like to see Google+ do, too. It's been a feature all along on Multiply, which I used for, gosh, 7 years? But it was hamstrung by their less-than-slick implementation of friend lists.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
In the years that I've used Facebook, my settings have never been changed. Facebook has only "changed" settings for people who never changed their own settings in the first place. If you left everything default full open, then when they added new controls, those were also left default full open.
Anyone who'd ever changed their settings never had them changed.
All the people whinging and moaning last year over this were people who'd never taken the time to change their settings in the first place.
Rather than moderate this guy up - I need to chirp in and respond that YES, he's precisely correct. Facebook have done this MULTIPLE TIMES.
I don't care how easy the security is to work with, I care about them fucking resetting it on me.
You weren't paying very much attention then to what was being done with your data. Facebook Beacon was one of the worst privacy violations I've ever run into, bad enough for them to lose a class action lawsuit over it. The Face Recognition feature was also enabled by default, letting data collected from your pictures be used to tag your face in other people's pictures you appeared. If that doesn't seriously concern you, you should reconsider just what else could happen with that data.
Your profile should feel like your home on the web — you should never feel like stuff appears there that you don't want, and you should never wonder who sees what's there.
That's they way I read this. I thought this was their wish from the beginning; don't think, just post.
Tapio 'itn' Nuutinen
> You should never wonder who sees what's there
No, you shouldn't, especially not who sees it because we sold it to them. Go and play some more farmville, like a good little product.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
I still instantly close any website which tries to play music at me without asking
Say you click a link to a video on YouTube that happens to have music in it. Is that "asking" enough?
The benefits of competition. Facebook never would have done this without competition from Google+
He said he constantly does what he can to destroy them. Which may very well be nothing at all.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Why does the email is a different account?
They can want to do that all that they want. I have never given them the login details to any other service, and I never will.
How in the world does complaining about putting all of your eggs in one basket become expecting everything in life on a silver platter? I could simply avoid Google+ and avoid the hassles altogether.
:-) True. My point was to abide by Hercule Poirot's dictum - the more someone talks, even if they lie, the more they reveal about themselves.