What came to my mind when I read this was the concept of pre vs post moderation. I find myself viewing posts to my wall in a very timely fashion, almost immediately after I receive an email from facebook letting me know that I have a new post on my wall from a friend. The purpose of doing so is more so I can moderate what the individual has posted on my wall and much less because I am so interested in the immediate consumption of that post. I would love an option on facebook to place many public actions in a pre-moderation queue...tagging me in a photo, posts on my wall to name two. In the absence of those tools, the idea of always deactivating on logout seems like an inconvenient but possible alternative to close that time gap.
I'm just speculating, but if everyone in your close circle of friends does this, then FB might start feeling like IM on steroids. You can only see people who are online. When they're offline, all traces of them vanish.
Wish people would link to original sources more often. Come on this is HN, we don't need or want the extra layer of gloss for this.<p><a href="http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/11/08/risk-reduction-strategies-on-facebook.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/11/08/risk-re...</a>
I use a different way to keep people away from my wall, that is as effective, but less work.<p>I have a whitelist (a list of friends) that sets who has access to my wall. So, when I accept friendship from someone, this new connection does not have access to my wall and private photos straight away. I must put him explicitly to the whitelist.<p>I fing lists a very good tool to set who sees my wall, pictures and info, and even to set who sees what on my wall (more personal posts are just visible to a subset of the whitelist).
Maybe I'm missing something, but this seems really pointless. What would be wrong with friends browsing your content when your not around? As if you knew they were accessing your profile and what-not anyways. The only way I could see this as being useful would be to keep friends from posting inappropriate material - but then setting filters/blocking would be more sensible.
Am I not using Facebook like everyone else is? I've never had anyone post anything inappropriate on my wall, or tag me in a photo I'd rather not be tagged in. If it ever happens, I'm removing that person as a Facebook friend. Not sure why it needs to be more complicated than that.
Although whitewalling will prevent users of FB from accessing your data, FB will probably retain it, as we have seen them do with pictures: <a href="http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/07/are-those-photos-really-deleted-from-facebook-think-twice.ars" rel="nofollow">http://arstechnica.com/web/news/2009/07/are-those-photos-rea...</a>
Someone needs to write a chrome extension to make whitewalling and super-logoff more convenient. If users are able to forgo the annoying questionnaire that is coupled with deactivation and batch delete posts after an expiration date, these techniques become a whole lot more attractive.
I think you can set it to allow "Only Me" to tag yourself in photos. At least, I recall doing that a while back. (Knowing FB, it wouldn't surprise me if it's been changed or broken since then...)