Slashdot Mirror
Facebook Privacy Boosted As Private Message 'Leak' Is Dismissed
judgecorp writes "Claims that old private Facebook messages have been leaking onto people's Timelines have been dismissed by the French privacy watchdog, CNIL. Apparently, as many concluded early on, the "leaked" messages were just old Wall-to-Wall posts, that users had mistakenly believed were private. Given the lack of user understanding, now is a good time for Facebook to revamp its privacy help pages. Let's hope users pay attention, and Facebook genuinely resists exploiting their naivety." Update: 10/04 17:42 GMT by T : Maybe we shouldn't be so hard on Facebook; Mark Zuckerberg says keeping up with a billion users makes it tough to follow all that data.
Boring generic anti-Facebook tirade aside, you do raise an interesting question: Facebook's privacy didn't change, it just failed to be breached. So what got 'boosted'? Your perception of it?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
When this first started being posted around facebook, I had a few friends that insisted their actual private messages were being displayed, even after being presented with evidence to the contrary.
I do find it interesting that so many of us users have essentially forgotten or misremembered how our facebook socializing has changed with updates over the years.
LegendMUD
Surely we can all agree that "Facebook Privacy" is an oxymoron.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
I remember checking into the claim of a security change when the claim was first made. It was easily disproven by checking my Facebook E-mail notifications from 2007. Every message that had been identified as a private message was not on my wall, and every message that was on my wall had been identified as a wall post.
Hi Rob,
God you really got out of this hell hole on time. That cocksucker from Dice Holdings walks around like he's the king or something. Chrissake he told me to come on time tomorrow! And of course sourceforge is acting up and the guys over there aren't so chummy anymore, we're just another user to them.
Say, do you remember where we put the design document on the private messages system? There's several bugs open, but CowboyNeal wrote that module so you probably have an idea of the "quality" of the code. He's a fucking monkey felcher and you know it.
Anyway, see you Saturday in town. We can talk about Kathleen and Jeff, and again, I'm sorry you had to go through her email to find out about them. I'm going to fucking kill that asshole.
Cheers
Timothy
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
Are you referring to anything specific?
I do not use facebook much, but I tend to notice things when I do. For example, the chat feature had been enabled on my behalf. I do not want people to see that I am "currently online" and by now I have disabled that feature more than once, since it somehow magically gets reset to "enabled"
Then there is this tendency to allow indirect access. See here. Basically, applications may access your information by your friend's permission instead of yours.
Finally, see a quote from this article. It is from 2009, but I think it is very representative of Facebook attitude. Most of the time you _can_ keep your setting private, but _only_ if you are actively tracking how facebook re-enabled access by default and proactively re-disabling that in settings.
Facebook announced this morning that its 350 million users will be prompted to make their status messages and shared content publicly visible to the world at large and search engines. It's a move we expected but the language used in the announcement is near Orwellian. The company says the move is all about helping users protect their privacy and connect with other people, but the new default option is to change from "old settings" to becoming visible to "everyone."