Is Facebook unethical, clueless or unlucky?

I think the only reason this hasn't become a monster shitstorm is because the vast majority of users don't realise how their page looks to people who aren't their friends, and don't yet know how exposed they are.<p>It's also hard to spot the changes to profile picture settings unless you notice that in search results you can now click on the profile picture: the page otherwise looks identical to how it did before, when you couldn't.<p>I was bitten by this, and consider myself fairly savvy. I carefully read the entire new settings roadblock, and made sure all of my old settings were kept. Nonetheless, a day or two later I double-checked, and after drilling down four levels, discovered that all of my profile pictures were set to "friends of friends", which is massively too loose.<p>Facebook wants to open up, but has it forgotten that it only became the size it did because it was the first place on the web that older and untechnologically savvy people felt they could trust with their personal pictures and data?<p>They break that trust at their -- and our -- peril. People burnt by the exposure of pictures they thought only a private and vetted list of people could see will be very wary of trusting any of the services some of us are trying to build.

I don't get it. (caveat/disclaimer, I work at Facebook, and this is entirely and completely my opinion only. I did not work on the privacy settings project).<p>The process was as far as I can tell, _completely_ upfront. No dishonest changes were made. There has been considerable prior notice, huge amounts of press; the interface forced you to look at it and make your own choice, every reasonable privacy setting was made possible.<p>The default selection was based on users' previous settings where things mapped cleanly, and where they didn't/where it made sense, the recommendation the site made was to make more things public- because Facebook believes that's the best way to provide utility to the user. Which isn't outrageous- there are obvious features that would be bettered and enabled by having more sharing in the system.<p>Why is it deceitful/duping users then? Are you claiming that every software/website that shows you a EULA is cheating you into using the service?<p>This whole argument is based on the prejudice that (a) Facebook is out to be dishonest with their sharing practices (b) users are dumb (c) the best way to use the internet is to batten down the hatches and live in a bunker. I disagree with all of these.

"Perhaps I’m being hyperbolic (who me?), or maybe they are a little of both, but the fact remains they screw up on important issues almost as if it’s a 'best practice' to do so."<p>That's how it is beginning to look to me, like Facebook has INSTINCTS that guide it to make the most sleazy or annoying changes it can.

<i>If we don’t behave well then we are going to get regulated by clueless politicians and policy makers.</i><p>Wise words indeed. And when it happens, entrepreneurs everywhere will be crying.

Actually, it might be worse than the article says.<p>TFA says that it only changes your settings once you click through... but I have been getting new "friend requests" from people I have never heard of this weekend (since the change went into effect), I think because my profile and various other info had already been made public.<p>Facebook's entire thing (IMO) was that it was a safe and private way to share stuff between friends.<p>What they've just done violated all of the brand equity I had in them, and I am seriously considering shutting off my account. I have already maxed out the privacy settings.<p>It's this type of crap that causes a promising idea like Facebook to turn into a has-been in a matter of years because of mass flight of users.

So, my experience was the complete opposite to his. Had Facebook not forced me to view my privacy settings, I probably never would have. The settings they suggested were quite conservative and I definitely didn't feel as if they were trying to trick me into picking any particular privacy preference. At the end of it, I was actually appreciative of them.<p>How else would you have handled it? I think the way they dealt with it was the most upfront way. They couldn't have been more straightforward. It was in your face, and if you're the one who decided to skip over the privacy options they were making ridiculously accessible, then it's your fault.

In addition to being somewhat trollish, this article is inaccurate. The change doesn't make everything public -- the settings vary by type of info and also I think it tries to preserve customizations (I'm not completely sure how that aspect works, but different people get different defaults as I understand it). A quick search turned up this screen-shot: <a href="http://images.smh.com.au/2009/12/10/960612/420-facebook-privacy-420x0.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://images.smh.com.au/2009/12/10/960612/420-facebook-priv...</a><p>Also, I'm pretty sure his "search" theory is mostly nonsense. From what I can tell, the change is driven by a genuine belief that these settings provide greater utility for users. This has certainly been my experience sharing on FriendFeed (which is more public) vs sharing on Facebook, so I tend to think it's correct.

Zucker, Facebook, and Facebook’s investors have shown their true greedy colors all along. The initial big tell was Beacon: <a href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/07/the-facebook-ad-backlash-begins/" rel="nofollow">http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/07/the-facebook-ad-backlas...</a>. The most recent (before last week) was Scamville: <a href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/31/scamville-the-social-gaming-ecosystem-of-hell/" rel="nofollow">http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/31/scamville-the-social-ga...</a>. And now this.

From what I've read, the new updates default to share with "everyone" only if you have NOT modified your privacy settings in the past.<p>If you have, which probably anyone concerned with privacy has, they default to "not everyone" choice.<p>The rest of the point stands - people use facebook to keep in touch with their friends. They're not interested in content propogation to strangers.

I think I understand what they are trying to do, &#38; it is not all that bad. The implementation is just a bit sleazy. For social networks (especially upstart little ones), one of the best traffic sources will probably be your members getting Googled.<p>If you are active on half a dozen sites &#38; you Google your name, Facebook doesn't tend to do too well.<p>Apart from that there is also chatter of various sorts that may drive some search engine traffic &#38; perhaps some Twitter-like real time stuff.<p>It must be frustrating that with all the long tail relevance of the site, they are letting all this traffic go by.<p>But I think Jason is right, this is sleazy.

I'm not convinced that it was the "Golden Child" who instigated the change, and that the "adult supervision" failed to stand up and object. My impression of dotcom execs is they're generally more rapacious, unethical and greedy than any founder.

Traffic per user is decreasing that is why you are seeing moves like this to boost traffic. Their business model relies on traffic per user going up not down. They will continue to do immoral things like this until they go all out and change the terms of service and sell all your data to advertisers.

I went through the same process as Calacanis and most of my content had been automatically set to Friends Only. Maybe it's Calacanis who's unlucky... or clueless, or et cetera.

<i>So why is Facebook trying to trick their users?<p>Simple: search results.<p>Facebook is trying to dupe hundreds of millions of users they’ve spent years attracting into exposing their data for Facebook’s personal gain: pageviews. Yes, Facebook is tricking us into exposing all our items so that those personal items get indexed in search engines–including Facebook’s–in order to drive more traffic to Facebook.</i><p>I would say that Facebook doesn't really care about attracting traffic through natural SEO. It's not like people are going to sign up because they found a random Facebook profile when searching for something else. There are a lot of obvious benefits to FB if users are more open about its details, but it seems like the author of this article hasn't actually thought about what they actually are. Less politely, he's just a troll.<p><i>Facebook has had a couple of innovations in their history, like their application layer and news feed (which is now gone), but for the past couple of years they’ve given up on innovation and focused on stealing ideas from Twitter and out-executing them, while not caring about user rights.</i><p>How many ideas <i>can</i> you steal from Twitter? Focusing more on status updates is about it.

The popup dialog box was fine. It would have been better though to have more of the defaults tuned to more privacy enhancing options.<p>Facebook is cool, though, and I check my home page a couple of times a week. That said, Facebook is more interesting as an application delivery platform, and their third party developer support seems to be pretty good.

Facebook's address book importer is no better - This is not the first time Facebook has done something like this (as the original email points out. I have been personally duped by facebook's address book importer before and have blogged about my experience here -<p><a href="http://www.prateekdayal.net/2009/07/18/beware-of-facebook-address-book-importer/" rel="nofollow">http://www.prateekdayal.net/2009/07/18/beware-of-facebook-ad...</a>

Seriously? You'd think that they would learn after the Beacon ordeal (easily the event with the most negative publicity in Facebook's history.)

agreed. most users assume Facebook content is (somewhat) private

Hasn't anyone noticed that many Facebook users will friend <i>everyone</i> and <i>anyone</i> who asks? This suggests to me that they either do not care about privacy much or, more likely, don't use Facebook status updates for intensely private information.

I'm a little unclear - I just logged in today and reverted everything to how it used to be (I think). Were the new settings active before I logged in? I.e., did I have publicly exposed info while I was away?

I’m sorry, what the frack just happened? I turned over my friend list,photos and status updates to everyone in the world? Why on earth would anyone do that with their Facebook page?<p>Facebook is a Twitter wannabe, That's why.

To butcher Hanlon's razor - "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by bugs".

"I’m sorry, what the frack just happened? I turned over my friend list, photos and status updates to everyone in the world? Why on earth would anyone do that with their Facebook page?<p>The entire purpose of Facebook since inception has been to share your information with a small group of people in your private network."<p>I don't know, maybe it's just me: I've always assumed that anything that I put on the Internet will be known to anyone. I've never turned on any of these privacy settings, and I'm pretty okay with that.<p>I can see why others may want to. But I don't.<p>Maybe I've been on Twitter for too long.

No.

I resent Zuckerberg. He got extremely lucky and is massively overrated. I wouldn't be upset if he were just a millionaire a few hundred times over; who cares about that? But he certainly doesn't deserve to be the most successful member of our generation, and hopefully someone will eclipse him in that regard.<p>Facebook has some exceptionally good programmers, due to its financial fortune, but the mediocrity of vision and hubris at the helm persist. Facebook has some great technologists, but the leadership couldn't make a good decision to save their lives. Luckily for them; to this point, they've never needed to.