Zuck's Events (Facebook Privacy Hole Demo)

http://zesty.ca/facebook/#/4/events

by yef • 16 years ago

72 41 16 years ago

zesty.ca

milkshakes6• 16 years ago

It's worth noting that this information was already available publicly before f8.

tewks4• 16 years ago

Set your privacy settings on lockdown and then put your own Id in instead of "4". This is undesirable behavior.

milkshakes6• 16 years ago

I agree. However, this isn't a new development. It's just more in your face now.

smokinn• 16 years ago

Are you sure? I'm checking myself and nothing is available other than my profile photo.

/[my id]/events

data (empty)

Maybe his privacy settings aren't as stringent as mine?

jpeterson2• 16 years ago

There will eventually be a great turning point on the web when everyone finally understands most of the privacy issues and makes a decision on whether they really want their lives to be private or not. If they go for privacy, Facebook will fizzle out--their business model depends fundamentally on invading privacy. If not, Facebook may just take over the world.

simon_• 16 years ago

Obviously some people will choose one way and some people the other. And Facebook will continue to serve those that are willing to trade privacy for convenience/connectedness.

jpeterson2• 16 years ago

You're right, that is obvious. I guess what I'm saying is that it will be a very lopsided split.

Silhouette2• 16 years ago

> And Facebook will continue to serve those that are willing to trade privacy for convenience/connectedness.

But it won't serve them as well if half their friends aren't there any more. Facebook's biggest strength today is its ubiquity: I am "the awkward one", the odd one out, because I gave up on Facebook a long time ago over privacy concerns.

I have noticed over the past few months that I get an increasing number of e-mails from friends, sent to increasingly large numbers of my other friends as well as me, and mentioning that "X is up on Facebook but for the people who aren't...". At this rates, it's going to go back to being easier to send messages over e-mail and host your photos up on something like Flickr, and if that happens, Facebook is probably toast.

tewks4• 16 years ago

It's also worth noting that a lot of facebook's initial appeal, especially when compared to Myspace at the time, beyond its aesthetic improvement, was the fact that it seemed to stand for privacy. The status quo, myspace, was a public-only profile. A facebook profile was accessible only to your contacts or to your school. The available options have slowly but continuously drifted away from that simple promise. A lot of the site's initial traction was driven by huge demand for a reasonable set of privacy controls: myspace was useful but creepy. The argument that the web has moved on in the past six years and that the demand for privacy has lessened is perhaps a red herring, though only time, consumer demand, and viable alternatives will tell: there might be more of an opportunity here than people realize.

Overall, I think this is a really interesting question that society is confronting and it will be fun to see how it plays out.

Side note: I think a lot of the tech press and blogosphere miss a lot of the subtleties here because, well, people like Arrington, Scoble et al. weren't in school at the time, making the cautious decision to open an account. This has been a revolution led by young people, who are often surprisingly concerned about their privacy and don't depend or plan on Internet celebrity for their livelihoods. It feels a bit like eternal September except in reverse: as the demographic ages, the basic tenents erode.

CGamesPlay• 16 years ago

Can you enumerate on how the privacy settings are dwindling? Which ones? I feel like I've had greater control over my privacy with more recent changes to Facebook.

blackswan2• 16 years ago

I remember when all my friends joined Facebook - it happened between high school and university. A couple of them had MySpace during high school but everybody had Facebook by the end of the first year of university. Back then I distinctly remember some friends motivating their getting Facebook when they didn't have Myspace by explaining how Facebook only let your friends and university peers see your profile - as per the excellent parent comment.

I recently explained to these same non-tech folks that applications they have installed can see and now store all their data. They didn't realise this and I don't think they really believed me - perceptions, once formed, take a lot to change! And when only the tech media really discusses API access etc. it's not surprising that most people have not registered the change in how Facebook treats their data.

I quote a non-tech business major friend who was in the above conversation: "It's unintentional bait and switch man - he got everyone signed up by making things better than the other sites and then his investors realised how much money they could make, changed the way data is handled and all the clueless users won't realise it until its too late and Facebook runs the internet!"

mortenjorck• 16 years ago

Ironic that Myspace created nowhere near the privacy crisis that Facebook has simply by offering no privacy settings at all.

Unlike Facebook, Myspace offered no illusion of privacy.

scott_s2• 16 years ago

Facebook only has access to what you give it.

pak2• 16 years ago

Or what your friends give it, or your friends' friends, or anybody else that can tag something that relates back to your profile... see the problem?

frederickcook• 16 years ago

I think it's worth pointing out that on Twitter, there is only one privacy setting, when you set up an account, and you have complete access to who sees your tweets. Unless I missed a major news story about this, I don't think Twitter has yet violated anyone's trust there.

Facebook, on the other hand, by either incompetence or some skewed sense of openness, at some point has made a choice that it wants to put all your information out there while giving you the illusion that you have some control over it.

The point is that privacy isn't impossible. It's simple. You have an element in a database that is flagged as important to someone, so you make sure that before you ever pull that element out and put it on the web, the proper controls are in place. It is just a choice a company makes of how high of a priority to make something, and Facebook has demonstrated that privacy means more to them as a PR issue than a real concern about user data.

runT1ME• 16 years ago

Its interesting you put things so black and white. I'm not sure its the case.

Take me for instance. I value privacy quite a lot, I don't even read my gmail over http, I'm always on the https site. :-)

However, given that the internet is populated with Ads, I'm more than happy to give the entire world a list of movies, music, bands, clothing brands, hobbies, etc. that I have so I don't keep seeing irrelevant, annoying ads.

I'd be happy if amazon obnoxiously let me know when a new CD from one of the bands I enjoyed came out, or that new movie by my favorite director was released on Blue Ray.

What I don't want, is the web knowing that I commented on such and such's wall, or that I'm attending my sister's surprise birthday party.

I think a internet with ads that doesn't infringe on privacy is possible.

philwelch2• 16 years ago

I suspect Facebook's mission is to ease people away from their privacy willingly.

thefool• 16 years ago

that's quite the mission statement :).

Google: "Organize the worlds information" Facebook: "Change societies views on what is private"

riffer• 16 years ago

Whatever you think of Mark Zuckerberg, you have to respect him for this. He knows his information is available through the API, he has chosen to make it publicly available.

It is ultimate dogfooding; equivalent to being able to see Eric's and Larry's and Sergey's searches.

EDIT: blackswan is right; tamed down the comparison to Google in the last phrase

CWuestefeld• 16 years ago

On the other hand, his celebrity is now giving greater exposure to the activities of his associates -- they're getting dragged in without much of a choice. I don't think that's very noble of him at all.

blackswan2• 16 years ago

It's actually like seeing only a small selection of Larry and Sergey's searches - not all of Zuckerberg's content is public. He says so in one of his status updates that is public.

javajones• 16 years ago

Is there another posting for this? I can't get to the article through the link.

milkshakes6• 16 years ago

yup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1294632

JangoSteve• 16 years ago

This seems to integrate exactly with your existing privacy settings, so I guess there was no real surprise here. Mine were pretty much on lock-down anyway. I found myself, and every single link except my profile picture and my likes showed "data empty".

aroon• 16 years ago

I'm not sure why people are so offended by what Facebook has done. They've just made the information people made publicly available already easy to parse for computers. Full disclosure: I had no way to prepare for Facebook's new features and I haven't change a single privacy settings since it launched. I just used this site to check what was publicly available for the first time and none of it was a surprise except my events and I don't feel invaded in any way. Feel free to browse around my profile.

http://zesty.ca/facebook/#/aroon

milkshakes6• 16 years ago

what bothers me is not that people can see what I've rsvp'd to, but that they can see what I've been invited to, but ignored (unless i remove that event, which must be done manually for each event).

My friends invite me to a lot of events that I _never_ want to publicly be associated with, but unless I specifically remove this event, the whole world can see it.

Zuck's Events (Facebook Privacy Hole Demo)

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