Openbook

by jgv • 16 years ago

163 77 16 years ago

ihodes3• 16 years ago

This is almost an argument for having open status updates: these are hilarious.

On the other hand, had I not just deleted my FB account, I would have been upset over this. Zuck's gang recklessly opens up whatever they see fit: it could easily and quite possibly be photos tomorrow and your wall the next day, and (as before: http://cl.ly/16wW) your "private" chats the day after that.

Irresponsible and disrespectful.

whalesalad• 16 years ago

You can prevent that information from being public with a simple setting. I don't know why so many people are whining and bashing Facebook. It's a SOCIAL NETWORK. The entire point of it is to share information with people you know. Don't share what you don't want people to know, and lock down your settings (that they make quite easily available) to filter out the rest.

I can't stand this FB bashing. Zucks gang recklessly opening up whatever they see fit? It's a FREE SERVICE!

david927• 16 years ago

Gmail is a free service. They had better not open up my emails to the public.

toppy• 16 years ago

SERVICE =/= DATA

JustAGeek• 16 years ago

I partly agree. However, the problem is that the default of FB is to share everything to everybody and the average user isn't aware of that - if they knew, I don't think they'd be that comfortable with it.

rit2• 16 years ago

The issue here is classically updates have been private. In most cases people are USED to the fact that their updates are private.

Many of them have no idea that suddenly their shit is public. I'll bet the old default search on this service of "Rectal Exam" which had painful details in many cases of people or their family with cancer, or this DUI search are examples of shit if people knew better would set private.

Unfortunately they most likely THINK they're still private. ( To be fair I'm more likely to think Rectal Exam would be something people would prefer private... the DUI people seem more like they might not care who knows).

Most users of services like Facebook can barely figure out how to login - they most certainly don't spend the amount of time the fine denizens of places like Hacker News do reading about the latest privacy changes and flaps. It's a disservice to expect (and I'm speaking from the standpoint of Facebook's "Let's randomly change settings" because they KNOW they're changing things and most people don't realize they've changed) the average Facebook user to realize that suddenly something which for years has been private (friends + family only) is suddenly public.

On one hand you have the aforementioned prior default search of this service (posted last week) which brings up embarrassing details about hemorrhoid surgeries and heartfelt updates about Grandma's rectal cancer. This is stuff that the simple reality is well, people have a right to expect they're posting a private update to friends and family. A few years prior this would be the kind of thing you'd send in an email blast, perhaps.

On the other hand you have the DUI stuff. In all reality the current glance at it is it's a lot of pucker faced young kids who probably genuinely don't care right now. I can't and won't assume they aren't proud of their current status as a drunk driver. But I guarantee in a few years when suddenly their careers take off (I'm being optimistic and hopeful on all of their behalves - so many of them look too young to even legally drink in the US) that this will become a problem.

Not every employer runs criminal background checks (Which most certainly would flag a DUI) and those are typically done in conjunction with / contingent with a job offer. But many employers these days are Googling the names of people who send them resumes. I can guarantee (again, being optimistic) that these people would NOT like to find out Googling their name brings up a proud brag about their DUI conviction.

TL;DR - I'm still half asleep, but what I'm saying is the issue is bait and switch. Hacker News readers know about every privacy change that is made at Facebook. My mom and sister though, for example, only know what historically has been true. They assume that their updates by default still go to family and friends. They filter their posting with that in mind. Your average user is NOT informed that their updates suddenly go public, and can be viewed by anyone.

edit - it seems it does a random search now. Previously it opened up "Rectal Surgery". This morning it defaulted to "DUI" for me. Hence my commentary above (assumed it was statically defaulting to DUI incorrectly now)

GeneralMaximus• 16 years ago

> ... it could easily and quite possibly be photos tomorrow ...

Your Facebook photos are not private at all. Anyone who has a URL to your photo can see it. In fact, anybody can access any file on FBCDN[1] as long as they have the URL to said file.

We share lots of Facebook pics on irc://irc.oftc.net:6667/#hackers-india. A lot of us don't have FB accounts, but those who do paste FBCDN URLs of interesting pics in the channel. Fun times :)

[1] FBCDN is Facebook's content distribution network

ErrantX5• 16 years ago

It's surprised me this hasn't come up much before now (in the recent debates)... it is one of the oldest issues and by far one of the most important!

It's sometimes even possible to turn knowing a random FB Photo URL into viewing a whole (or part of) an Album.

tome• 16 years ago

This is initially very scary, but after thinking about it for a while I'm not so sure it's that big a deal.

After all, when someone else is permitted to upload photos of you to the internet, all bets are off.

If you couldn't share the URLs on your IRC channel then you could just copy the photos and post them to an image sharing website.

what• 16 years ago

I think you have to know certain things like the person's fb id, album id, photo id to construct the URL. Or you have to be able to view the photo on FB to get that URL. In either case, who ever distributes the URL already had access to the photo. So that's more about trusting your "friends" to keep what they see private than trusting Facebook.

yosho• 16 years ago

this really reminds me of myspace for some reason. Maybe it's just the type of people I see on there.

flatline• 16 years ago

I guess it's just because I have always known that everything I put on the web is potentially kept around forever, that I generally don't put anything on there I would be embarrassed about someone else reading. These posts aren't exactly damning or anything, and this is certainly not enough to make me want to stop using FB. I actually enjoy seeing it open by default - like you mentioned, these are hilarious. I couldn't care less if everyone can see my wall though admittedly I'm not a heavy user. This is pure value-add in my opinion, a downside for only a very few.

param• 16 years ago

awesome! Fastest/Cheapest way to teach laypeople about Facebook privacy issues.

aheilbut2• 16 years ago

If people don't mind friends and people they actually know reading such updates, why would they care about strangers?

ihodes3• 16 years ago

Because friends and family aren't your boss you're bitching about on Facebook.

Please, this argument is getting old.

And if "people" didn't mind, this probably wouldn't be getting so much attention.

aheilbut2• 16 years ago

Honestly, what's getting old is a small, vocal, paranoid, patronizing minority blowing things way out of perspective while hundreds of millions of people go about their lives in the same world that not long ago had both water-coolers and telephone directories.

jacquesm5• 16 years ago

Interesting, that's almost a carbon copy of another project that someone showed here a few days ago. That one had more queries than just 'rectal exam' though.

kmavm5• 16 years ago

It's because they're thin wrappers around Facebook's stream search, a feature we shipped in July of 2009. The actual search engine is Facebook's. These projects are just hitting an ajax endpoint with a query and dressing up the results.

Ironically, this is the very same feature that I prostrated myself over here when it was down for a few hours 8 days ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1333000). Which way do you want it, HN? :)

If I can preempt the inevitable flood of "How do you sleep at night???" variants: note that you can't really use this to target an individual user. There are 400 million people using Facebook. If you query something embarassing, you might see some titillating content go by, but that doesn't prove much of anything. Those same search terms typed into Twitter search, or for that matter Google, turn up a lot of material that I would not choose to share, but these people have apparently chosen to do so. If you really want to invade privacy, stream search would be a spectacularly stupid way to do it; any given result has a 1 in 400 million chance of being from who you're looking for.

Like Google, Twitter search, and every search box on every web site ever in the history of anything, this search feature is privacy-neutral: it only allows you to see what you were already allowed to see. Does the fact that Google'ing for "my rectal surgery" uncovers some over-sharing make Google, or the web, evil? Or is it at least possible that the good done by answering legitimate queries outweighs this apparent harm?

jacquesm5• 16 years ago

> Or is it at least possible that the good done by answering legitimate queries outweighs this apparent harm?

For sure the latter.

We should make a tutorial on online privacy management though.

ashot• 16 years ago

sorry not the same.

when I type an email I have an expectation that only I and the recipient will see the email.

similarly, a vast majority of these people are not intending to broadcast these updates into the public space (non-anonymously with a photo of their face attached next to the update)

I personally don't have any moral outrage over this, but that is the issue. You've built up an expectation of privacy with people and then took it away without enough user messaging. One dialog if I remember correctly, saying something along the lines of "Share your updates with everyone." (what does "everyone" even mean?)

tldr: you switched the defaults on people and they haven't realized it.

mos15• 16 years ago

Your argument would be a lot more plausible if Facebook didn't have a habit of resetting peoples privacy settings, and if those settings were clearly, easily and permanently settable.

As it stands, I can only presume your defensiveness and your obviously nonsensical comparisons to twitter (a system where everyone knows that everything is truly public) make me think you know, deep down, that your employer has made some bad decisions.

I'm curious: does facebook train their employees to identify themselves as employees then to rail angrily and arrogantly at people who have privacy concerns, or is that your own initiative? Either way I'm unsurprised by it. Facebook seems like the sort of place where such utterly unprofessional behavior would be the norm.

Facebook: unilaterally changing your privacy settings then berating you and making disingenuous comparisons when you get upset about it since 2004.

aresant• 16 years ago

Nice UI element on the search by male / female.

aidenn0• 16 years ago

So what's up with all the links to hottie223? Did people get hacked, or paid to post the links or something?

http://youropenbook.org/?q=hottie223&x=0&y=0&gen...

[edit] Nevermind, as I scrolled down, the profile pictures started repeating, guess it's just ordinary spam[/edit]

pavs4• 16 years ago

Not a big user of either twitter or facebook, But I am trying to understand this. How are these two examples different?

http://i.imgur.com/ZuDt1.png

http://i.imgur.com/U3xcm.png

ihodes3• 16 years ago

I think this addendum the user whose tweet you posted has describes it quite well: http://cl.ly/18ax

Twitter users, unless they protect their tweets (in which case you're not searching though them: surprise!), know that everyone can see their tweets. Facebook users have "friended" the people they want to see their status updates.

Either you're genuinely confused, in which case I hope I've cleared things up, or you're using this as a red herring.

pavs4• 16 years ago

Either you're genuinely confused, in which case I hope I've cleared things up, or you're using this as a red herring.

>Not a big user of either twitter or facebook, But I am trying to understand this.

You know there are people out there who are actually foreign to how Facebook works because either they don't use it or find it silly. I am not trying to defend facebook or twitter. I actually find the whole idea of following around people's mundane activity utterly stupid. ~400 million people obviously thinks otherwise.

natrius5• 16 years ago

You are assuming people don't know that they're sharing with more than just their friends. You don't have any data to back this up. There is, however, evidence to the contrary. 35% of users adjusted their settings when presented with the privacy transition dialog back in December, and that's not including the people who had modified their privacy settings in the past, which made them not default to "Everyone".

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_brags_35_adjus...

Some of these people in the search results know they're sharing with everyone. Some don't. The mere presence of people who don't understand their privacy settings doesn't suggest that a large portion of the Facebook userbase shares that confusion.

friendstock• 16 years ago

also, facebook insists on your true identity, whereas twitter handles provide some anonymity

paul9290• 16 years ago

Just don't write this stuff on the web and have your identity attached to it. It's asinine.

Jun82• 16 years ago

Has FB bashing fallen to this level, querying "going to the strip club" and listing the results with a big "see, I told you so"? I scrolled through maybe two hundred of the "strip clubbers", most seem to be the kind of people who put this in their status updates for sensationalist value, judging from their pictures.

I also queried "I love my wife", "I love Shakespeare", "quaternions" and wound up wasting more than an hour on this site. It's fascinating and not all in a bad sense. In fact, we should have a Digg-like "best 100 best statuses of the day" site.

Point of the matter is: If you don't want your statuses to be public, adjust the settings. At this age and time arguing most users don't know how to do this or were somehow duped is appalling.

jacquesm5• 16 years ago

> At this age and time arguing most users don't know how to do this or were somehow duped is appalling.

Why? Most users really don't understand the consequences of the default settings, let alone which checkbox has which effect.

Just the other day I was browsing CNN and to great surprise a section on the site named a HN user as recommending that I should go and check out some link. Turned out it was powered by facebook and I had made the mistake of not logging out.

That's something that won't be happening again, but I'm not sure I could have predicted that sort of thing would happen.

And I'm definitely not comfortable with it.

For me, facebook has changed from a place where I share some stuff about me with my friends to a shingle for people to get in contact with me through other means.

I will not delete my account because that is a useful function, but my facebook days as an active user are mostly over (not that anybody cares or should care).

natrius5• 16 years ago

CNN doesn't get any of your Facebook data. It's an iframe hosted on Facebook. That HN user wants people to know that he likes that article.

(Your reaction is partially justified due to the existence of Instant Personalization on Yelp, Pandora, and Docs, which does share information without your consent.)

natep• 16 years ago

Don't you remember the incident just a short while back that revealed how many Facebook users Google 'facebook login'? These weren't necessarily 'stupid' people, they just wanted to check on their friends and share what's new with them. Anything else (like learning a bit about how the internet works) is just an annoyance.

And before you say it, no, this didn't affect 'most' Facebook users, but these aren't the only ones leaving their privacy settings on default.

motters2• 16 years ago

Really it should be the opposite way around. Anything on facebook should be private by default (only viewable by friends), with an opt-in to make it public (anyone on the internet can see it). Only a minority of the population are exhibitionists who want drunken pictures of themselves to be made universally visible.

DeusExMachina• 16 years ago

Did you try the other searches? I'm literally astounded to see what people write on Facebook. I would never write those things on a public place.

jsz0• 16 years ago

After a few test searches I couldn't really find anything interesting. It's actually kind of amazing to see so many people saying basically the exact same things Strength in numbers? I learned some people I don't know are going to strip clubs. I learned some people I don't know are watching TV shows and movies. I also learned that people I don't know are eating various things and they are yummy. Is this something to be concerned about? People who have friends & family on Facebook, so the vast majority of the users, are already self censoring.

JMiao• 16 years ago

"paternity test" is a good start.

ErrantX5• 16 years ago

This is interesting actually. Browsing some common keywords it seems that out of 200 million users very few seem to have open status updates compared to the same test 6 months ago the number has more than halved.

ErrantX5• 16 years ago

Hmm, this is interesting.

My Facebook profile is "open" by default [1] ( particularly my status updates) but I can't get my statuses to show no matter what queries I try.

Has anyone been able to nail down:

- what exactly gets pushed into this feed

- what privacy settings remove you from or ad you to the feed

(kmavm, anything you can add in here?)

1. http://www.facebook.com/errantx

motters2• 16 years ago

Probably the best example of why Facebook's privacy policy is broken. If you do a search for "drunken" I'm sure that most of these people only intended the photos to be viewed by their friends. Such material could easily be used to embarrass, bribe, bully or discriminate against people in job applications.

Groxx2• 16 years ago

Are people really deleting their Facebook accounts?

It looks that way. Currently delete facebook account is one of the top searches on Google. [ http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=delete%20facebook%2... ]

No no no no no, that's not what those graphs show. They all hit 100%. It's growing extremely quickly, but the graph shows nothing more. By the same graphs + the flawed interpretation, in July 2008, "Batman robin" accounted for every Google search. Look! 100%! http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=Batman%20robin&...

Why do I see this continually misinterpreted? The "learn what these numbers mean" link is pretty darned clear, and it can easily be grokked by doing more than one search.

Groxx2• 16 years ago

reply due to not being able to edit: fixed!

dalore• 16 years ago

Search for horny, limit results to girls (or guys depending on pref). Win!

philschwartz• 16 years ago

There are a bunch of fake profiles that includes all the default search keywords. While that's fun, it may destroy the authenticity of the message this site is trying to spread.

FabriceTalbot• 16 years ago

I think it's pretty obvious that once you put your photos on your Facebook (or other social media channel) profile they are pretty much public. I don't really understand why people would upload sensitive information about themselves in the first place.

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