This useful graphic explains it all. You need to click on the listed years on the right hand side of the page, to see how the private parts of your profile dwindle with time.
In addition to whatever objections one may have to the level of privacy, I associate the number of changes with a fundamentally defective product idea.
For the pointer I thank Kat.
Isn’t a “face book” what the cops use to look for suspects?
I just checked the privacy settings to confirm what I thought.
It’s possible to remove yourself from search engines, make your profile not come up in Facebook searches for anyone except friends, and make your profile display nothing except a name (which you can change. So you can display a fake name if you want).
You can make yourself nothing but a non-searchable name. Sounds pretty private to me.
Colin,
You are very badly mistaken about how private your “private” information is on Facebook.
See for instance,
A Handy Facebook-to-English Translator
The failure of Facebook to maintain privacy is a fundamental flaw of the purpose of Facebook to make one’s private life and thoughts public??
Seems to me Tyler has decided Facebook users are not rational and sophisticated people, just like those liberals, who want government consumer agencies to protect consumers from their own ignorance and unsophistication, decided Facebook users are not rational and sophisticated people.
But Tyler, I’m guessing, believes Facebook just shouldn’t have been developed in the first place.
Having been involved in product development an security, dealing tangentially with the concerns of the NSA level security freaks that worry about being able to transmit data out of a secure data center by using the power management of computer systems to signal via the variation in power used by the facility at the rate of one bit per second, Microsoft web software design was a disaster. Every time I hear the “trademark” Experience I think of the experience of fighting designed in security holes in Microsoft software.
My employer and all the others who worried about security before and while designing software are “out of business” while Microsoft dominates. The message is clear – do not worry about security before the security issues arise because you will never have a successful product.
We could compare Microsoft and Apple to the US and China. With Microsoft, the many security problems result in lots of law enforcement and laws to prevent the wrong “freedom” often too little and too late, while in China, the wrong freedom is secretly banished, disappeared, imprisoned, or on occasion arbitrarily executed.
No one who uses Facebook or any of the formerly dominant social networking sites cares about any of this junk, which shows why the doomsayers have been completely wrong so far about how Facebook is dying in popularity — rather than surging.
The biggest privacy concern that young people have is whether or not other people can find out whose profiles you have viewed — in particular the owners of those profiles!
I quit Friendster after just a few days when I found out that they send messages to anyone’s profile you view saying “X has viewed your profile.” MySpace and Facebook have always been committed to not blabbing that out for the person to know.
And on the other side, users of social network sites would love to get their hands on a program that *would* allow them to see who has viewed their own profile. Think about it — you could tell whether or not that cute girl who sits in front of you in math class has sought out your profile! Google “facebook tracker” or “myspace tracker” to see what I mean. None exist, but that doesn’t stop millions of people from wanting it.
If anything, I think the greater degree of privacy that we’ve seen on Facebook (see Colin’s comments) has made it less appealing for me. It signals a lack of trust when you don’t let anyone see anything about you, while you can still read everything about the other users. It was a lot more fun when things were more out in the open — it’s a public website after all — and you were actually allowed to customize your page, instead of these soporific profiles with the de rigueur tab feature.
http://www.MyCarInsuranceRates.com – free online quotes and rates from multiple insurers to help you find the right price and save money, plus tons of articles on state insurance requirements
“I associate the number of changes with a fundamentally defective product idea.”
I associate comments like this with a poor understanding of the nature of “products” like Facebook, which are obviously quite different in many respects from anything that has come before. (And no, I’m not a fan of Facebook.)
“I associate the number of changes with a fundamentally defective product idea.”
It’s actually more about trying to monetize every part of the experience, and an inability to resist exploiting the value of the network, than it is a defective idea. In some ways it reminds me of companies that sell their customer list and the list of what those people have bought.
“Your Facebook Account Has Been Deactivated”
“This misses the critique of FB, which is largely that it sells the private information you intend only for your friends to anybody who is willing to pay.”
This is completely false. Facebook does not now, and never has, sold user data to third parties.
I work there. If this ever changes, whoever runs the place (since it is apparently no longer Mark Zuckerberg) will have my, and most of the rest of engineering’s, badges on his desk by end-of-business.
I think the big issue is that most users don’t switch from the default settings. It’s not like, if I created my account last year, the settings stay at the privacy level I had last year. It’s that, if I didn’t change from the defaults last year, I have the default settings for this year.
Also, the concept of “Everyone” in the privacy settings changed. “Everyone” went from being “Everyone on Facebook” to “Everyone on the Internet”.
Tyler:
“I associate the number of changes with a fundamentally defective product idea.”
You know they’re not making cars or airplanes, right? Software is easily malleable compared to physical objects, and so gets tweaked constantly to respond to new business goals or market needs. The cost of experimentation is very low.
What do you consider “defective” about the Facebook product? Setting aside any changes in philosophy over time, if they’d had this level of privacy when they started out, they would never have grown their user base to its current staggering level. Now that they’ve got everyone locked into a network effect, they’re selling the users out.
I’d love to hear more detail about your view of the product and the reasons for the changes.
I’d love to hear more detail about your view of the product and the reasons for the changes.
Facebook every day is finding the new ways to communicate and share with the outside world.The new feature they have added some days before-the ‘like’ button by which we can able to know what our friends like across the web but I don’t want to share my some of the information with all.I don’t like that Facebook is attacking the on my private data.
Tim Spalding, the creator of LibraryThing, had the best summary of the problem: Why do free social networks tilt inevitably toward user exploitation? Because you’re not their customer, you’re their product.
There is simply no stopping the fact that once anything gets released to the web it is there forever (and easily search-able). In the years to come as the next generation comes to bat we have a far less chance of seeing someone with a very hard to view past (writings) as we now see in Elena Kagan in her nomination to the US Supreme Court.
Theo http://www.kagansupremecourtnominee.com
This is certainly something to write home about.
These is one of the great information which you can share with us. Facebook will die once the infrastructure is in place of a free distributed social network where people retain sovereignty over their data, and share equally with their networks.
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