When building out Appleseed, I decided on a principle early on that's important for a sense of social... well, not privacy, that's not the right word. Segmentation, more like it.<p>But first, humans rely on segmentation. I want to know that if I'm hanging out in a bar with a bunch of friends, I can talk a certain way that I would never talk around my parents or my extended family. If a member of that social group walks into the bar, it's awkward, but on some level, they opened that pandora's box, by encroaching on my social space.<p>Facebook doesn't seem to understand that, preferring instead to just dump everything into one box labelled "Social!" and forgetting that you interact with your friends different from your family, your coworkers, etc.<p>So for Appleseed, the principle I'm focusing on is that, when you report to your friends, you report on contexts, not actions.<p>So, when you upload a photo, or post a journal entry, or a status update, you're creating context, and the appropriate friends are notified of that context.<p>However, when you comment on that context, you are taking an action. The recipients of that context are notified, but your friends are not (unless they're already mutual friends of the context owner).<p>In other words, Alice posts a journal entry to her College Buddies friends circle. Bob comments on that journal entry. Alice's College Buddies friends circle is notified of Bob's comment, but Bob's friends are not notified unless they are also one of Alice's College Buddies.<p>This isn't perfect, someone so inclined can still search for your comments and find them, provided the privacy settings are open enough. But let's as least make stalking require an extra action, instead of doing it for the user.