Facebook is scaring me

http://scripting.com/stories/2011/09/24/facebookIsScaringMe.html

by moses1400 • 15 years ago

553 270 15 years ago

dasil003• 15 years ago

This is the wild west and Facebook is doing a land grab.

dmoney• 15 years ago

From the RWW article, it looks like you have to enable a "social news app" for this to be an issue. I don't know why anyone would do that.

sp3322• 15 years ago

Nope, the JS that Facebook gives people to embed a Like button on their page, sends the URL of the page back to FB without actually being clicked. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/germany-facebook-like-but...

mpclark3• 15 years ago

So how many of us are concerned about this from a personal privacy point of view, but still have all the Facebook buttons and markup all over our sites?

I'm a little concerned that, as a website operator, I really ought to work with Facebook because it will lead to more PVs because it is advertising my site for me.

But I've been uncomfortable for some time as I watch my friends and my children slowly confuse the web and Facebook. It's easy to see a day when, for most non-techy folks, the web is Facebook.

So, I can close my FB account. But I think, in the spirit of doing the right thing for the world, the web and the future, I also have to take Facebook off my site and face whatever consequences that may bring.

Or am I being a fuddy-duddy old reactionary?

travisp2• 15 years ago

It's true that Facebook almost certainly tracks users through the like button, but that is different than what is being talked about here. When Facebook tracks that you read a webpage through a like button, they do not display it in your friends feeds.

While many people reasonably aren't comfortable with Facebook knowing where you're going all the time, it is a very different thing than Facebook sharing that knowledge with all of your Facebook friends.

That feature, the one the original article is talking about, requires you to specifically opt-in before the "Bob read an article about sexual dysfunction" starts showing up in everyone else's news feeds.

jhferris3• 15 years ago

That may be true, but even if it is, it isn't sharing this activity with your friends, that would be facebook doing exactly what google does with their analytics platform/js.

I don't get the freakout people have over fb potentially tracking you through something you can see (the like button) vs google doing it everywhere with something you can't (the analytics js)

shuw• 15 years ago

Google Analytics sends URLs to Google on a even larger majority of websites. FB was hardly the one to start this trend.

The different in FB case, that they are not "required" to track URLs so they could of chosen an alternate implementation where sites in-directly served FB scripts through their own servers. And FB would only received a request when someone interacted with their elements.

prostoalex2• 15 years ago

The app still has to request 'publish_actions' permissions, which requires an FBConnect dialog.

That URL is being used for customization of Like button, so that on some sites you can see 'Friend A, Friend B and 345 others recommended it'.

sneak3• 15 years ago

Logging out doesn't necessarily disable the tracking, though, as the cookies are still there. You could delete them, but I bet the like buttons reset new ones, which correlates your history to you the next time you log back in.

Much better is to just nullroute their netblocks at your router. That's what I do.

icebraining2• 15 years ago

It's been already shown that FB creates an unique ID for you even if you don't have a Facebook account.

dev1n• 15 years ago

Where has this been proven?

grovulent• 15 years ago

where does one find these netblocks?

netaddict• 15 years ago

You could use chrome's facebook disconnect extension https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ejpepffjfmamnambag...

sneak3• 15 years ago

http://bgp.he.net/AS32934#_prefixes

euroclydon• 15 years ago

It's a pain, but I just white-list third party cookies.

palish2• 15 years ago

Wow.

You have a lot of determination! Kudos.

zerostar072• 15 years ago

As always Winer is worried, rightfully so, but people aren't going to log out of facebook. It seems Zuck really wants to get back at people for making him pull "Beacon" back then, so he reintroduced it. Of course it's a privacy concern, but i think people no longer have illusions about their privacy on facebook.

Alex3917• 15 years ago

"people aren't going to log out of facebook."

I actually have a separate browser that I use just for Facebook. Granted I only do this because FB doesn't work for me in Chrome, but it's still a pretty easy way of getting the same result.

hugh3• 15 years ago

I'm seriously considering only using facebook on my phone.

emehrkay3• 15 years ago

Correct me if I'm wrong, but flash cookies are cross-browser

malloreon• 15 years ago

The issue that people don't pay enough attention to, though, is that we're no longer "on" facebook.

badclient• 15 years ago

I recently decided to RSVP for a meetup on meetup.com. It was a meetup I don't, in fact, want most folks I know to know about. I made sure to use my junk email account that doesn't have my name tied to it.

So I was scared shitless when after RSVP'ing I see faces of all my facebook friends and an offer to invite them. I always thought you had to do the whole facebook connect crap before websites could just splash your fb friends list at you? Then I thought about all the billion different ways facebook has to integrate them into your site and figured this must be one of the ways.

watmough4• 15 years ago

If you don't immediate terminate your fb account when you see this, you're like one of those people who can't leave their abuser.

That's just all there is to it.

Just as a matter of interest, has anyone ever taken a close look at what's actually in the static content that you can download when you quit fb?

haldean• 15 years ago

Pretty much any of it. If there's a photo I want a friend of mine to see, but they don't have permission to see it, I just send them the URL of the static content and it works every time, whether or not they're logged in.

sans-serif3• 15 years ago

That's it? So if I rationally weigh my cost of having to watch where I click and find it to be significantly less than the benefits from hanging out with friends online, I'm a victim of an "abuse"?

It's a sad day for HN when thoughtful discussions have been replaced by such obvious sensationalism nonsense. We can compile kernels but Facebook's super-complex privacy settings reduce us to wimps.

forgotusername• 15 years ago

If you can handle the broken Canvas IFRAME apps on Facebook.com, Facebook Privacy List for AdBlock http://www.squirrelconspiracy.net/abp/facebook-privacy-list.... prevents this kind of thing from happening.

Also as a nice side effect, no more dumb share buttons on every web site.

verisimilitude• 15 years ago

Does EasyPrivacy accomplish a similar thing? Anyhow, I've added this in to my AdBlock. Thanks!

zzzeek• 15 years ago

use Firefox "Private Browsing" when you want to drop into a temporary session free of cookies.

emehrkay3• 15 years ago

This is why I closed my Facebook account two years ago (happened to me on cnn.com). But I'm back. I just wanted those "connections," I don't think that it is worth it.

elisee• 15 years ago

The website doesn't have access to your friends and cannot post anything without your consent. It can just set up an isolated iframe which is controlled by Facebook. There is no communication between the iframe & the page you're on (except for the initial setup data) so the website cannot post on your behalf. It might sound creepy but it's actually very safe.

In the article, the writer is at issues with social apps that he allowed to post on his behalf. It's entirely different.

My take on this: the (only) problem is that Facebook has changed the way info is displayed (with the ticker feed) and in that new context, the rights we gave to social apps on our Facebook accounts have been extended. Not technically but that's what it amounts to in pratice, since it's much more likely for stuff getting posted to be seen.

rhizome6• 15 years ago

The fact that you can be going about your regular Internet life and not know if something you do will or won't be posted to a social network is a huge problem. Facebook's approach seems to be to boil the frog toward people not giving a crap about privacy at all, to voluntarily give it up as a reflex or instinctual action, or not to notice that it is already gone, all under the cover of "being friendly." I mean, you aren't such a grump that you don't want to tell your friends what you're doing, right?

Facebook is using peer pressure against privacy.

xpressyoo• 15 years ago

Another analysis/viewpoint: https://plus.google.com/111297306144520956414/posts/JLQogwzo...

Garbage• 15 years ago

I guess, I should always browse Facebook in "Private Browsing" mode, without any other site open in that session.

mike-cardwell• 15 years ago

RequestPolicy users are protected against this entire class of problem. When I'm looking at a webpage, I know it isn't pulling in content from any other site, including Facebook, unless I specifically allow it to.

jordinl2• 15 years ago

So it seems the solution would be to have different browser profiles. For instance, one for regular browsing, one for FB and one for gmail?

cpeterso2• 15 years ago

Flash cookies ("shared objects") are across shared across all browsers and browser profiles. If FB uses Flash cookies, you could log into FB on Firefox and they can still track you in Chrome!

jordinl2• 15 years ago

scary...

codecaine• 15 years ago

I think Ghostery deserves some promotion here : http://www.ghostery.com/ available for all major browsers. It blocks near to all webbugs including the facebook social plugins.

Lagged2Death• 15 years ago

Great Scott, they've got an Opera plugin. (https://addons.opera.com/en/addons/extensions/details/ghoste...)

keeran• 15 years ago

This is why I block FB in the hosts file (https://gist.github.com/1197453) and only use my mobile devices for FB messaging.

suprgeek• 15 years ago

A good time to point out the Ghostery Browser extension. Use this at the most paranoid setting so that when FB and others pull stunts like these you have at least some measure of protection.

Terretta• 15 years ago

I recommend Ghostery: http://www.ghostery.com/

Quoting:

Ghostery is your window into the invisible web – tags, web bugs, pixels and beacons that are included on web pages in order to get an idea of your online behavior.

Ghostery tracks the trackers and gives you a roll-call of the ad networks, behavioral data providers, web publishers, and other companies interested in your activity.

Choose to block - or not. You get control at a company level - are there some marketers you trust, but others you'd rather turn away? Ghostery lets you open the valve of your web behavior as wide or as narrow as you'd prefer.

dotmanish• 15 years ago

I just tried it and browsed to TechCrunch.

wow.

getsat• 15 years ago

Kind of amazing how it loads 10x faster, eh?

bryanh• 15 years ago

Try avc.com next...

joelhaasnoot• 15 years ago

Another option I have installed as a Chrome extension is Disconnect.me

LogEx• 15 years ago

Ghostery and Disconnect are essential privacy tools in Firefox, Safari, or Chrome. Also try ShareNot on Firefox, which is experimental, but has somewhat more extensive blocking coverage than Disconnect.

But more fundamental: don't log in unless you have to, log in only in private browsing windows or separate browsers from your other surfing, and also clear your cookies often to keep your not-logged-in browsing cleaner from a privacy perspective.

mtogo5• 15 years ago

Just a note: Neither Ghostery or Disconnect work in Chrome, since Chrome doesn't have any kind of ability to block requests from being made. The experimental webRequest API should help with that, but it hasn't been released yet.

chokma• 15 years ago

Another very useful addon in Firefox is the RequestPolicy plugin, which blocks requests to other sites. You have to explicitly allow a site to connect to Facebook or Google analytics.

The only downside is that it is sometimes a hassle on pages that integrate third-party payment solutions which often have a lot of redirects and off-site scripts and iframe content. But then, like in noScript, you can always allow all or some request types from a page permanently.

betageek• 15 years ago

Came across Ghostery professionally earlier this month, seems to be quite primitive in it's detection which surprised me. A site I knew to have tracking on didn't get picked up due, as far as I could see, a change in the filename of the tracking .js file. I was expecting it to track domains in a similar way to AdBlock.

newoffer• 15 years ago

How does this compare with addons like Adblock and Noscript?

mtogo5• 15 years ago

It doesn't. Noscript blocks scripts and plugins from executing on the page and AdBlock blocks a specific list of ads.

Ghostery blocks a list of trackers such as google analytics, KISSmetrics, and facebook social plugins[1]. Ghostery generally won't affect the page at all except in invisible ways, but it will remove Like, Tweet, +1, etc buttons to prevent requests from being made to Facebook/etc.

You can also fine-grain set Ghostery to allow certain trackers, like Google+ buttons, while still blocking all the others.

[1] The tracker that this article is about.

P.S.: Watch out as Ghostery doesn't actually work on Chrome. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3034093

Cmccann7• 15 years ago

thanks for posting this, just installed Ghostery and it's the best thing I've done. very eye opening into what some sites are doing

BrandonM5• 15 years ago

I use Ghostery as well, but few people seem to be aware that you can also use AdBlock for this. Subscribing to the Fanboy (or EasyList) "Tracking/Stats Blocking" filter will block cross-site requests to sites like Google Analytics and Facebook just like Ghostery will.

patangay3• 15 years ago

I'm an engineer at facebook. I want to clear up a few things that you guys are talking about.

For starters, it's true that a visit to a news story or watching a video will trigger a feed story. The point that most people seem to be missing is that this requires you to knowingly allow a social application. For example, in my case, I installed the social plugin for rdio (rdio.com). When I listen to a song on rdio, it publishes it to my friends ticker feeds. (Ticker is the bar on the side where likes, listens, reads, etc go). There are a couple websites that are doing read social browsing, for example the Washington Post's social reader (https://apps.facebook.com/wpsocialreader/). Again, just by visiting this page you will not trigger anything unless you have already allowed the application access.

In the past I've setup my music player on the laptop to publish the songs I'd been listening to, to my IM client (as away messages) - Adium let's me do this out of the box. It's kind of the same idea, instead this is just built in to the website you visit or music you listen to.

You can also disable any application you previously installed by going to Privacy Settings and clicking on Apps and Websites. It should all be there. You don't have to log out of facebook or close your account. Just delete all your social apps. (https://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=privacy)

gmantastic• 15 years ago

That's very helpful, thanks.

paulsmith2• 15 years ago

Is it retroactive to apps that you've installed previously? For example, I signed in with my Facebook account on 3rd party site X and accepted the permissions, and at the time it didn't auto-publish to my feed (or "ticker" or whatever), but now suddenly it will be publishing automatically without my explicit say-so?

X-Istence11• 15 years ago

According to some the app will have to ask for those new permissions before it will be allowed to do them, for now.

ptarjan• 15 years ago

No. It is a brand new permission that must be granted.

You will know since the dialog will be centered around "Add to Timeline" instead of "Authorize this app".

rsl7• 15 years ago

I'm sure you're still storing all of that data, whether we opt-in or not. Because why throw away such valuable data?

And that means it will be made public some day, by accident or by design.

BrandonM5• 15 years ago

How narcissistic must we be these days to think that our friends actually care about every little thing we do? It has apparently reached the point that we just want to share everything we're doing without applying any kind of personal filter to the stream of data we are sending out. This is silly. We're going to be swimming in a tide of noise and get sick of this whole social thing if someone doesn't slow down and consider what it is that we actually care to know about our friends.

3pt14159• 15 years ago

So let me get this straight, only white listed websites (not apps, websites) will have content shared from them?

If that is the case this whole thing is overblown. We were all thinking that BuddyApp would be able to publish your generalized browsing. Which is terrifying for a whole host of reasons.

orijing3• 15 years ago

I am a software engineer at Facebook. Bear with me because I don't have any PR-quality answer to give you. I am not on the platform team, but I have built apps before in the wild-west days.

The app requires explicit permission from the user in order to post activities automatically. The idea, if you watched Mark's presentation, is called "frictionless sharing." A lot of people don't share because it's another step, but if they could install an app like the Washington Post Reader (a great app--even Mark has it installed), they are happy with sharing articles they've read with their friends.

I understand you might be concerned, for example if you added that app without realizing that it will post content. If you are concerned about the privacy implications, you can always change individual permissions for an app by going to your account settings, then selecting the 'app' tab on the left, or by going to https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=applications. If you are concerned about spamming your friends' news feeds, that's why we built ticker, for the light-weight activities like "watched a movie" or "listened to a song" or "read an article".

If I remember correctly, the exact wording of the app permission request was alarming enough to get my full attention ("I, the application, can post as you" or something like that), so I'm worried less about a user missing that part. In my known experiences, the app was installed with the knowledge that it will share your experiences--because the idea is you want to share your activities with your friends. As soon as I read an article, my first action is to either send the link to specific people who are interested, or post it on my wall if I think everyone is interested.

We operate under the assumption that users will not do what they don't want to do, as long as we make it explicit what might happen. And if they make a mistake, they can always go change their settings. So I'm not so worried about users who sign up for the Washington Post Reader app, which is marketed as a social reading experiment, and subsequently complain that it shares your read articles.

You might still be concerned, in which case, please let me know why (users being misinformed?), and I'll try to pass it onto the platform folks, who were really heads-down the past few months.

X-Istence11• 15 years ago

The reason why this bothers me is that there is no longer any EXPLICIT confirmation that I want to post something. Not sure who said it but I read it in a TechCrunch article, "Just hit play in Spotify and it will share with your friends".

No, any sharing I do HAS to REQUIRE an EXPLICIT action on my part. I have to be in full control. Visiting a web site does not mean that I believe it will be interesting to my friends NOR do I want that information shared with people on Facebook.

A like button that shares, much like the Google+ 1+ button is perfectly fine, I have to hover over it, and choose my circles to share with, and then share. It is not automatic once I visit the site.

I don't want articles automatically being linked just because I visited a page, or clicked play in Spotify, or put the toilet seat up.

It is not just privacy concerns, it is the image I try to convey while using social media sites where it is common place to be friends with your boss and or co-workers. I don't need them knowing I like the Bloodhound Gang or that I read articles about atheism in the NYT but have never read a single article about religion.

Eventually all this collected data will be used against me. What if I do a simple Google search for cancer and I end up reading an article about it, that is now shared publicly, my insurance company a few years later gets a claim for cancer they claim it was a pre-existing condition and deny me coverage.

These are all scenarios going through my head. I am all for the interconnected web, and making it easier for me to introduce my friends to new content across it, however it has to be done on my terms, it has to require explicit authorisation and must never do something automatically without my consent. If I like the content enough I am extremely likely to copy and paste the URL into my social networking sites, I don't mind that extra step. Create a bookmarklet that fills in some of the forms ahead of time for me (I have a reddit bookmarklet that fills out title, URL and the sub-reddit to post in (personal one for me to share links with friends)). I am more than happy to continue using the platform, but this frictionless sharing scares the crap out of me, and will see me closing my account sooner rather than later if it continues down the path that it looks to be going down.

Slizyboy3• 15 years ago

If you don't want to share anything, then don't use the app. Nothing is automatically sharing unless you tell it to. Nothing can magically share the fact that you read a Techcrunch article unless you install a "Techcrunch Reader" app or something, in which case it would have to ask your permission to share that information. If you didn't like it, you can remove that permission. For example, here's the relevant permission from the Washington post app:

Add app activity to your timeline Washington Post Social Reader may publish your app activity to your timeline.

If you don't want the app to automatically publish something, then just x out that permission.

orijing3• 15 years ago

I totally understand your concern about sharing things that might hurt you in the future. Anyway, I guess the Washington Post Reader wasn't designed for a lot of people like you, so there's nothing lost from not installing the app. But I have lots of friends who do love sharing all the articles they read, so to each his own.

I sympathize with people's concern about apps requesting more permissions than they need to do their job, but here, "sharing articles I've read" is a core part of what the product is.

So if you don't install the app, and I do, what's the problem?

prostoalex2• 15 years ago

To clarify on Spotify, there're options to (a) connect with Facebook (i.e. use it for login purposes) and (b) send the music you play to Open Graph. One does not depend on another, and (b) can be turned off without impacting (a).

anigbrowl2• 15 years ago

It's eminently possible to just live life without Facebook. I stopped using it a few years ago, although more because I was being drowned with useless information from other people ('hand stuck in toaster again, LOL') than out of privacy concerns.

marcocampos• 15 years ago

I've been using ShareMeNot (http://sharemenot.cs.washington.edu/) for a few months now. I don't know if it's a perfect solution to go around but it's a solution nonetheless.

jeromeparadis• 15 years ago

I would recommend that app publishers, has a good practice, explicitly put the action as buttons to replace or complement the Like. So, I could click "read" and then it would publish the action. I think that doing so automatically on behalf of the user is asking for trouble.

dorkitude3• 15 years ago

Actually, Facebook's 'publish_stream' extended permission, which has existed for 1-2 years, already gave developers the ability to publish on your wall, without getting explicit confirmation on each article.

Similarly, for Spotify to do this Activity stuff, you need to give them an extended permission called 'publish_actions'.

If anything, actions are less dangerous, since the size and visibility of the content is significantly more limited than are wall posts.

Anyone saying otherwise either is linkbaiting or truly does not understand the Facebook platform.

wtvanhest• 15 years ago

This is 100% the correct way to look at this.

Facebook originally just allowed you to share what you wanted to. Now it is simply ridiculous.

CandidCalum• 15 years ago

You do realise you don't have to use these features, don't you? The features are there for those of us who wish to have this information automatically shared with our friends, but if you don't wish to, you can turn the automatic sharing off in some of the applications, or just don't connect/remove the application to/from your Facebook account.

Why complain about features you don't have to use, when many of us like to use them?

damoncali2• 15 years ago

This breaks down with the deluge of snippets of information, voluminous and arcane privacy settings, and the increasingly complex and cluttered UI. It's simply impossible for a normal user to keep up with.

Frankly, it's this assumption that makes Facebook untrustworthy. Perhaps you should assume that your users value their privacy. Asking for forgiveness rather than permission works for startups, but facebook is not a startup any more. Facebook has the users. They should start acting like they want to keep them.

sans-serif3• 15 years ago

I'm perplexed. If you find Facebook's privacy settings arcane and its UI complex, how do you get around Linux or Photoshop at all?

I totally fail to see how it can ever be a good business model to encourage users to share embarrassing stuff. Pretty sure, as a private entity who looks out for their own interest, they work to reduce this happening otherwise people would be leaving in doves.

zerostar072• 15 years ago

This functionality is already available by requesting the "offline_access" permission when adding an app. Until now facebook asked developers to cautiously make use of the permission, now it's actively promoting it. By making it the default behavior there is going to be a lot more content than it is today that is posted automatically, thus raising the chances of unhappy accidents. The user dialogs will become transparent to users over time, as they always do.

paulsmith2• 15 years ago

> And if they make a mistake, they can always go change their settings.

That is a really bizarre response. If a user makes a "mistake" and unwittingly publishes something embarrassing or damaging to their feed because Facebook made that transaction possible, the damage is done.

michael_dorfman• 15 years ago

Bizarre? I can't imagine any other response.

There's no way Facebook (or anybody else) can completely prevent people from making mistakes.

So, the best they can do in that situation is give people an easy way to clean up the mess, and make sure they don't do it again.

brandnewlow• 15 years ago

It's a problem because you guys keep trying to push us closer to sharing being opt OUT.

techiferous• 15 years ago

I'm curious, was there any user testing done? It seems odd to me that someone would actually want something shared automatically that they simply read. I understand wanting to make user interfaces more streamlined, but reading something and sharing something with your friends are distinctly different activities.

extension• 15 years ago

Seriously! How could this be anything but a crappy user experience? Who would want to share something before they even read it?

What would really suck is googling something private and clicking on a result that just happens to be on one of the sites that has permission to share. Oops.

rhizome6• 15 years ago

Business decisions are typically not subject to user testing.

gfodor• 15 years ago

This is bogus, and a slight of hand meant to further erode privacy while giving Facebook an argument to fall back on other than "it's in our interest to post everything you do into our stream."

The bottom line is that what is actually going to happen here in the real world is that people are going to connect their Facebook account to these web sites, not realize or forget (yes, people forget these things) that this web site has been given the keys to the castle to post whatever it wants on their behalf, and a ton of shit is going to get posted to the internet that was beyond the intent of the user originally clicking buttons just to get past an annoying confirmation dialog.

That said, the people fighting against this are fighting a losing battle. Facebook is basically going to control the world unless someone comes in and tries to beat them at their own game and impose their own vision of how and when information like this should be shared.

funkychickin• 15 years ago

There's always g+ from Google. So far they're staying true to the deliberate opt-in mindset instead of the facebook all-in then opt-out later mindset.

dorkitude3• 15 years ago

orijing (the engineer at Facebook) is right in that you do have to auth the app.

It's not as though could be browsing one day in search of "abortions Chicago" or "genital warts" and have that auto-published to your FB page. You'd have to give an app explicit permission to share activities on your behalf.

brown9-2• 15 years ago

Or one day Facebook could overstep and piss off it's common user permanently.

chailatte2• 15 years ago

You shouldn't stand up for facebook and scummy Mark Zuckerberg so much. You realize he's postponing IPO again and again so he can get you guys to work late nights month after month on tasteless projects like tracking people over the internet, kind of like carrots on a stick for donkeys, right?

frankdenbow• 15 years ago

Others have brought up the privacy concerns but for me the other issue is this: a share is an endorsement and if I havent had a chance to evaluate the content, I am endorsing it blindly. I may read an article and think it sucks so I wouldnt share it.

Retric• 15 years ago

Thanks for posting that, I have often wondered how Facebook could make such horrible usability decisions but it really seems like you guys have little understanding of why someone would want to use your service. 'You' had a relative spam free replacement for email and wasted that huge opportunity by letting random apps spam the channel. I don't want to share that type of crap not because I care about privacy, but because I don't want to waste the time of people reading my activity feed.

PS: I understand a huge part of FB's appeal and page views is the stalker aspect, but just think of all the people that would love to be able to flag all farmvill traffic as spam or simply ignore all posts by apps.

uiri• 15 years ago

If there is something in your news feed which you don't want to be there, you can click the down-pointing arrow. If it is created by an app, you can even hide all posts from that particular app.

A hide from all apps would be nice, but I think that would catch updates from cell phones and the like too.

Vaotix• 15 years ago

Interesting post.

While I have nothing against making it easier for people to share their lives or interesting things they come across, I want these things to be opt-in, not opt-out. Facebook has a history not really giving a crap about user privacy. And honestly, Facebook isn't a company I want to trust very personal information to. That's why my FB profile is pretty much only bare bones stuff and a few pictures.

I prefer Google's approach with G+ - your information is only shared with those who you explicitly allow sharing to. And they never automatically share something. You're in full control. If you're making an online identity, that's the way it should be. There shouldn't be opportunity for things to get out of your control. And I fear that the general public won't realize this is an issue until it's too late.

I'd like to point to another article that was posted here earlier: http://public.numair.com/2011_fbfool.html

Now, you can just dismiss the guy as bitter or whatever, but he does have a point. Facebook isn't the company you'd want managing your online identity. I have no problem with competition, but I have issue when one of those competitors acts sketchy and doesn't have the users' best interests at heart. It's even worse when the people either don't care or don't realize it.

mapgrep2• 15 years ago

What ever made you think anyone would want this functionality, other than the sleazier, spammier publishers?

Why would any person _ever_ want to automatically broadcast on Facebook the URL of every web page they read on a particular site? What is the benefit, to them? "How do I publicize a big chunk of my browser history" is not a problem any real person has.

The problem with this feature has nothing to do with disclosure or opting out. It's that it seems designed SOLELY for the benefit of publishers, who get more clicks and promotion, and of Facebook, which gets more social content.

dragonsky• 15 years ago

You forget that you are not the customer, you are the product. Facebook do not care what functionality you want, beyond what is required to keep you using the product. They care what their paying customers want, and that is access to as much information about the product (you) as possible.

jarin• 15 years ago

One of my clients is a porn site, and we're currently debating whether it would be a good idea to even give users the option to post what scene they're watching on Facebook. Some users will legitimately want that (they don't care if people know), but we would rather err on the side of not publicly embarrassing people.

gorm• 15 years ago

> If I remember correctly, the exact wording of the app permission request was alarming enough to get my full attention ("I, the application, can post as you" or something like that), so I'm worried less about a user missing that part.

Users don't read such messages, they press confirm buttons. Even if they read them most users will not understand the implications. It would be interesting to hear if you have done any user surveys related to this.

1point2• 15 years ago

Who the hell is Mark?

nrbafna• 15 years ago

okay. so, i always wanted to ask this. under privacy settings -> apps, there is a option to turn of all platform apps where i could select a few applications or all, and turn them off. but, the button to click on to turn them off is _always_ unchecked for me!

screenshot for reference - http://i.minus.com/itBcjOfzcchw4.png

paul9290• 15 years ago

Ok... i'm miffed, as Facebook has embarrassed me twice this week!

First when I created a new list called "Hotties I still want to X." I thought only I would know what friends were going to be added to this list. Unfortunately, that isn't the case, as Facebook sent a notification to each person on that list. That was very embarrassing, thanks a lot Facebook!

Second is when I downloaded Spotify. The ease of use of installing and starting to enjoy music was great. So much so that when I chose to play my first track I forgot Facebook was notifying my friends what song I was listening to(one i want to keep private due to ex-girlfriends)!

Thanks again Facebook! You have embarrassed me twice in one week! ERRGGGghhhhh!!!!

andrewljohnson• 15 years ago

Are you being serious or is this parody?

Angostura2• 15 years ago

One of my Facebook friends posted a link to a story from The Guardian yesterday, I thought that was interesting so I clicked to read.

The Guardian pretty much demanded that I installed their app. In the end, clicking 'cancel' turned out to be the non-intuitive way to actually read the article.

Yes 'cancel' let me continue with the action that I had been attempting.

charlieok• 15 years ago

My criticism applies to users of the feature as well as developers of the feature. You wrote:

"As soon as I read an article, my first action is to either send the link to specific people who are interested, or post it on my wall if I think everyone is interested."

In such cases, you are deliberately being selective in your sharing. I think this is as it should be.

Everyone is overloaded with information now, and one of the best ways to deal with that is to be good filters for our connections. This implies being selective in what you send, rather than broadcasting a high volume, low signal-to-noise ratio because doing so is "frictionless".

The more people act as good filters/routers of information, the better signal-to-noise ratio we'll all get.

sunspeck• 15 years ago

> We operate under the assumption that users will not do what they don't want to do...

This assumption is either totally disingenuous or shows an extraordinary lack of self-awareness on Facebook's part.

Possibly it is true, in sensu stricto, that "users will not do what they don't want to do". But for far longer than the internet has existed, the foundation of the advertising industry (of which Facebook is unquestionably a part) has rested largely in convincing people to "want to do" things that are actually contrary to their greater interests.

In other words, Facebook has the critical mass to spawn an "opt-in" culture when they damn well please. And a network as large as Facebook has the potential to be quite corrosive to civil liberties and the social milieu, merely in how it it structured.

psychotik• 15 years ago

"We operate under the assumption that users will not do what they don't want to do, as long as we make it explicit what might happen."

That's a BAD assumption. Average users aren't nearly as smart as folks posting here, in that they don't understand things the same way we do. If you've worked on apps with real users, or observed what even average Facebook users do, I would be very shocked if you disagree.

"And if they make a mistake, they can always go change their settings."

Try this out with your 10 non-techie family/friends sometime - ask them to show you a list of apps they've granted perms to. That experience might change how you look at users.

"So I'm not so worried about users who sign up for the Washington Post Reader app, which is marketed as a social reading experiment, and subsequently complain that it shares your read articles."

What about family computers/tablets? Dad wants to share with friends - kid uses iPad and now stuff goes to dad's timeline. Who do you blame? How do you fix this?

zb• 15 years ago

As soon as I read an article, my first action is to either send the link to specific people who are interested, or post it on my wall if I think everyone is interested.

Really? You've never read an article that you didn't feel compelled to share with somebody? Ever?

arcdrag• 15 years ago

Why are users misinformed? Because facebook has only crept more outside the nice boundaries of its own website. There is a line somewhere in between facebook knowing only what I explicitly post, and it knowing absolutely everything about me that users will not accept. Seeing that we're only accelerating towards the "knowing everything about me" side with no sign of braking scares me. Whether that's where you're at now doesn't matter all that much to me. I've seen no sign that this isn't where you're headed, and I don't want to be a part of it when you get there.

edoloughlin• 15 years ago

A lot of people don't share because it's another step, but if they could install an app like the Washington Post Reader (a great app--even Mark has it installed), they are happy with sharing articles they've read with their friends

I can't see the logic in this. I don't know if I want to share something until I've read at least some of it. I don't want it shared as soon as I open it in my browser. There should be another step...

cgag• 15 years ago

Yeah, I just can't imagine a single user on facebook who would think this was a good feature.

esrauch2• 15 years ago

I really have 2 quarrels with this; the larger one is that it shouldn't be acceptable for the behavior to change so radically without reauthorizing these apps. There should have been a separate permission for "automatically post without my action" which was turned on, and then let people enable it if they want.

The second quarrel concerns the design of the page that you linked to. I just checked the link that you sent, and I had about 50 entries, about half of which I don't remember adding and absolutely all of them were "more than 6 months ago" (in reality, some of them were more than 4 years ago).

Using your link, it was multiple clicks with a ~5s delay in the middle to remove a single entry. If you click a second X without waiting for the first response to pop up and click ok, it doesn't visually remove the original thing you X'd meaning you can't just go through and click all the X's.

No way to remove multiple entries at once. To remove all of the entries that I don't want took me something like 5 minutes, which is completely absurd. I have always been in general opposed to facebook apps so the average recent college grad could easily have something on the order of several hundred of these entries.

For anyone who knows anything about UX, it is fairly obvious that the page was explicitly designed to prevent people from removing apps. It is depending on a "laziness" factor to get people to do things that they actively don't want to do, which is horrible. It appears to be deliberately only removing the entry when you click ok on a delayed dialog even when the client side is 100% is sure that the entry is removed (click X, click another X without waiting for the dialog, the first item X'd will stay in the list since you didn't wait for the confirmation). Either a huge UI bug or a deliberate and unethical UX decision.

My issue with facebook is not at all what features they have or what privacy settings they have. The issue is that they deliberately use underhanded tactics to get their users to do what they want them to do. In the past they would change your privacy settings without telling you, and in this case they are using a privacy setting that meant one thing in 2007 to mean something very much different in 2011.

People who aren't as technical as you and I won't even think to look for the page that you linked to to begin with. In fact, people who aren't as technical as you likely won't even realize that the reason that these stream posts are showing up is because they clicked some facebook button on a website 4 years ago.

nbm4• 15 years ago

Existing apps that have been authorized will need to be reauthorized to get any new permissions, so you need not worry about previous apps suddenly doing something that you previously did not agree to.

I'll let the guys who maintain that page know about your comments about the UI. I suspect the one-app-at-a-time design is a combination of:

a) simplicity of implementation due to less code and reuse of components,

b) simplicity of use in the common case (just removing a single app),

c) not expecting people to selectively want to delete a whole bunch of apps (although there is a single "disable all" link),

d) that the platform team wants to collect ratings on the applications when you remove them to reduce distribution of apps that people don't like (and to take corrective action on apps that get bad reviews).

People who see posts on their profile page and find them irritating can easily hide them, and an immediate option is to remove that application. Each post is attributed to the application that made them. I'd say a level of web savviness is required, but not "technical" ability.

rebelidealist• 15 years ago

Bottom line on why auto-sharing sucks: Just because you read an article on the Washington Post or click play on a random song you found doesn't mean you like it and want to share it. You might be promoting a article you hate, disagree with, or find boring.

Bo1020102• 15 years ago

I ditched Facebook this morning when I realized my carefully-constructed "Don't show this part of my profile" list was wiped out in the last redesign.

I've always thought the complaints people make after each redesign were simply resistance to change, but this time it doesn't seem worth it to continue.

zdrtx• 15 years ago

Could you be a little more specific? What kinds of things were you not showing that are now showing?

Bo1020102• 15 years ago

I had my privacy settings set to "Custom" for wall posts, photos, and some other profile elements.

I excluded a list of people from seeing posts I made and posts other people put on my wall.

When I used the "View my profile as," I wouldn't see the excluded elements.

Once the new design launch, I realized that all these settings were lost - I can do "View my profile as" one of the people on my excluded list, and see the stuff I didn't want shown.

akarambir• 15 years ago

I too for the same reason have deleted my account. I don't feel i'm in control. Its too risky.

watmough4• 15 years ago

Accessing facebook.com/watmough ('deleted' account) shows 'content currently unavailable'. This used to be my account.

Accessing facebook.com/jonathanwatmough (likely not an account) shows standard 'page not found error'.

Deleting a fb account may not mean what you would expect it does. I think they are keeping my data warm for me.

And keeping your data warm too.

chailatte2• 15 years ago

Switch to other services (Instagram, Twitter, Google+). Problem solved.

Unless you like to be in S/M relationship. You're the S.

nemik• 15 years ago

I think you got those mixed up.

martingordon• 15 years ago

As the two FB engineers mentioned, you have to allow access to the app before it can know anything about you or take action on your behalf. See Step 2 of the Open Graph tutorial: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/beta/opengraph/tutorial...

Publishing actions requires the publish_actions permission, so if the app previously didn't ask for it, I believe you will be asked to re-authenticate the app with the new permissions.

I, for one, am going to be reviewing the apps I've previously added to ensure that none of them are doing anything I wouldn't want to. Not sure where to file FB API feature requests, but it would be nice to not have an "all or nothing" approach to authentication (this is a problem with the Twitter API as well, FWIW). For example, if an app requires X, Y and Z permissions, I might want to only allow X and Y and just not use the features that require Z.

Slizyboy3• 15 years ago

You can always remove Z later, but for the initial authentication I think you do have to grant all the permissions it asks for.

rhizome6• 15 years ago

Indeed there is a race condition (if that) where you have to allow access at the default privileges before opting out of any of them. I'm sure every single application sucks in your entire graph as soon as you click that button, so the solution to limit permissions after installing the app is just so much closing of the barn door after the horses have left.

molecularbutter• 15 years ago

LOL at all the facebook employees who are chiming into this thread (and others) to defend the latest creepery from their professionally invasive advertising company. I know you're just waiting for the IPO to cash in, but come on, how can you defend this nonsense?

lbrandy• 15 years ago

Is this -really- what hacker news has become? Really?

nak3d2• 15 years ago

It's the All-Hands Kool Aid Q&As with Zuck on Friday.

ngmcs8203• 15 years ago

This really comes down to Winer's tin foil hat obscuring what's actually happening and writing the story to reflect his lack of facts. For these "reading a story" posts to get to your timeline, you have to opt-in by installing the app and giving it permission to do that. If you're dumb enough to do that and get offended, maybe you should close your Facebook account.

X-Istence11• 15 years ago

Some webapps require using Facebook to login to even create an account on their site.

Now you can say that then they shouldn't use said site, but soon this is going to become more and more common, what then?

stfu• 15 years ago

Oh, so Facebook already sent their minions to HN? That was fast! Lately the negative stories are gaining a bit of a momentum. Very much like that development.

pointyhat• 15 years ago

All the Facebook engineers on here sound like I imagine IBM executives do when asked about the involvement of IBM in the holocaust...

I'm genuinely surprised that the EU haven't stepped on Facebook yet. It's the creepiest, most invasive thing ever developed.

mwsherman• 15 years ago

Wouldn’t disabling third-party cookies take care of this? (And many other questionable things?)

nostromo2• 15 years ago

In Chrome the option is to block 3rd party cookies from being set, not from being sent. Since Facebook sets its cookie while I am on their domain, I don't believe Chrome's blocking option is of any use.

mikewest• 15 years ago

In `about:flags` there's an option to change third-party cookie blocking behavior to prevent reading third-party cookies as well.

codeup• 15 years ago

The apologetic posts by Facebook engineers give deep insights.

Of course they can argue well on what are, for average users, technical details. On that level, it is possible to get entangled in endless discussions.

The real problem is that these posters seem to totally lack (or ignore) an understanding of the bigger picture of what they are contributing to.

guelo• 15 years ago

The latest url for app permissions is http://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=applications

kragen• 15 years ago

I've been logging in to Facebook and Google+ only in a Chrome Incognito window for this reason for a while now. I recommend the practice to everyone.

However, yesterday Facebook locked my account because I was browsing "from an unknown device" (the netbook I've been using for years, on the IP address of PyCon Argentina). I unlocked it by identifying five of my Friends from 15 photos. So it's not without its drawbacks.

nbm4• 15 years ago

In this case your account probably was not locked, you just needed to provide additional information to log in because something seemed unusual. So if you logged in from a known-good environment (ie, a computer we know you have logged in before), it would work - you aren't locked out of your account.

This is one of a few different systems we have to protect our users - in this case from having their credentials used if they are exposed through others sites, through phishing, or through some other mechanisms. You can a little about it at https://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=389991097130

The social authentication is one way we help people verify their identity in these cases - you can read about it at https://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=486790652130 . There are others - the easiest for most people is through sending a text message to your phone when you log in from a new device, which you can read about at https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150172618258920

If you are concerned about privacy, but not happy about having to log in from scratch each time and occasionally have to go through these steps (or not comfortable giving or not able to give a phone number for text message authentication), you might want to use a separate dedicated browser for Facebook that does have cookies enabled.

nextparadigms• 15 years ago

If people think Zuckerberg had "vision" doing this, I suppose I agree. But his vision wasn't "how can I help people have better online connections and experiences?" or anything like that. His vision was "how can I get people to share everything about their life, so Facebook can make more money?"

They are not one and the same thing, because in the latter, the priority is put on optimizing the experience for Facebook, not for the user.

Zuckerberg actually believes that there should be no privacy - at all. This is where he's leading Facebook. I believe that's a flawed vision, but he's probably sticking to it, because the less privacy you have, the more it helps the company.

nak3d2• 15 years ago

"We Are Building A Web Where The Default Is Social" - Mark Zuckerberg

Mark Zuckerberg is dead set on making Beacon work. This is his latest attempt by making the apps do their dirty work by asking for a permission and auto-sharing.

orangecat2• 15 years ago

My impression is that Zuckerberg honestly believes that the world would be better without privacy. Which is even worse than companies that are only focused on the bottom line, because at least they won't invade your privacy without a good business reason.

brudgers2• 15 years ago

Am I the only person who has a virtual machine which is used only for Facebook?

zorked• 15 years ago

The big question is, if you don't trust it, why use it at all?

brudgers2• 15 years ago

Because people I know use it as a communication channel.

Mistylynn• 15 years ago

No, I use one.

mtogo5• 15 years ago

127.0.0.1 facebook.com

127.0.0.1 www.facebook.com

127.0.0.1 connect.facebook.com

127.0.0.1 fbcdn.com

BrandonM5• 15 years ago

If you're going to go that route, it's much better to use 0.0.0.0 so that you're not sending HTTP requests to your machine. Otherwise, anything listening on port 80 (or 443, in some cases) will be receiving the requests intended for Facebook.

mtogo5• 15 years ago

Noted, thanks!

nieve• 15 years ago

Good point, though that leads to a really simple hack to see part of what gets sent to facebook - just hook up something listening on those two and look at the logs? I like ngrep for that kind of thing, but it's perhaps perverse overkill.

indrax• 15 years ago

http://webgraph.com/resources/facebookblocker/

http://sharemenot.cs.washington.edu/

wedesoft2• 15 years ago

I can recommend Fanboy's "Annoyance Block List". It will block requests to Twitter, Facebook, ... unless you are opening one of their sites directly.

(*) http://www.fanboy.co.nz/adblock/

BrandonM5• 15 years ago

Don't miss the "Tracking/Stats Blocking" as well.

Note that these are simply filters for AdBlock Plus. If you're already using it, it's pretty easy to add a couple more filters.

wedesoft2• 15 years ago

To block tracking I subscribed to EasyPrivacy ().

() http://easylist.adblockplus.org/

haberdasher• 15 years ago

You can use this Chrome extension to kill cookies when logging out: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bgonpegbhnjepleakg...

matjazf• 15 years ago

My reply: http://matjaz.posterous.com/why-you-should-log-in-to-faceboo...

Angostura2• 15 years ago

I've been ensuring I log out for quite a while now. I also have all platform functions disabled in my settings. It's all extra work though. There's a lot of friction involved in remaining private

erikpukinskis• 15 years ago

Facebook needs to let you uncheck rights when you Connect to a site.

jfb• 15 years ago

One idly wonders if it is possible to turn the (to me) useless ticker feature off.

altrego993• 15 years ago

Don't log out, because logging out each time and logging back in is inconvenient. Use a tracker blocker instead - like Easy Privacy with Adblock Plus, or Ghostery.

random42• 15 years ago

One of the good way to make general users/facebook realize the privacy concerns of auto-sharing, if popular Porn websites install the FB like buttons.

chemmail• 15 years ago

I recently built a website on wordpress and put in facebook connect plugin. It saves ppl a few minutes to login ect. I was extremely scared about the widget that shows who has been on the site. I do not believe that just logging in gives a website permission to publish that user has been to that website. This is just the tip of the iceberg. Facebook is getting out of hand.

nbm4• 15 years ago

There is no widget that shows who has been on the site, and it is not related to using Connect.

There is a "Like" widget, which shows who has "Liked" the site.

eldina• 15 years ago

Life is fine without Dorkbook. Never used it and hopefully never will, although it is getting harder and harder as my school has started to actively use it for e.g. communication regarding potential jobs for students and graduates in companies and institutions the school cooperates with.

nikcub• 15 years ago

Logging out of Facebook does not do enough. It still retains cookies that specify your account ID even after you logout.

You need to delete all of the Facebook cookies. Here is what cookies are retained, but you can test it for yourself to see.

While logged in:

   datr, lu, openid_p, c_user, sct, xs and act

act is your account number. now a new, fresh request after hitting logout still sends the following cookies:

   datr, openid_p, act, L, locale, lu, lsd, reg_fb_gate, reg_fb_ref

If you do not delete cookies Facebook know and can track every user that has ever logged in at your computer.

joelanman• 15 years ago

Doesn't this 'frictionless' sharing have plenty of precedent online? Anyone can view the tunes I listen to on my Last.fm page, the pages I bookmark (visible by default) on Delicious. How are these social apps on Facebook different?

On the point of 'noise', both these examples provide ways of making sense of the streams. Last.fm charts, Delicious popular streams, and tags.

motters• 15 years ago

I've been in the process of minimizing my Facebook presence, but have left the account open just in case a specific need to use it arises in future. I'm already on other social networks, and Facebook is relatively high maintenance in terms of chasing privacy issues and dealing with other nonsense. For me the cost/benefit just isn't worth it, although I realize that this won't be the case for everyone.

tarekayna• 15 years ago

Anything that you don't want to be published on facebook, just don't do it on facebook. So that article you want to read privately, just go to news.google.com and read as much as you want. Don't use the facebook app for that. Same thing, if you want to listen to spotify, don't link it to your facebook account, etc...

This is how things have been for years, and if you are a more private person (like me), just reading news and listening to music "offline" and go to facebook when you feel like sharing.

poona• 15 years ago

Maybe because not everyone lives 10 minutes from each other and is 100% independently mobile? And gee... occasionally even people that you really enjoy spending time with have to move to other areas of the planet.

akulbe• 15 years ago

What most people fail to realize is this... Facebook is not the product Facebook is trying to sell. YOU (and everything about your life!) are what Facebook wants to sell.

Facebook is the next great advertising platform, after Google.

saraid216• 15 years ago

It's not about privacy. It's about discretion. Why is this hard to understand?

kositlaorngsri• 15 years ago

ผมอยู่ในสมาคมแห่งการแบ่งปันและมีนํ้าใจแบ่งปันกับเพื่อนๆในfacebook

Facebook is scaring me

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