Facebook simplifies controls but continues exposing users

farcebook

"no they're dumb fucks.... anyway, wanna go dig up some corpses? I stole a shovel earlier. the clerk saw me so I beat him to death with it but... oh hang on - BOLLOX my wall is public again. damnit I guess that code I wrote to opt myself out of evil shit doesn't work. BRB"

- Mark

the settings are easy to use

Im confused as to why everyone is stating the settings on facebook are hard to use?

They are very simply and quite quick to set up and restrict your information.

All you need to do is create a "group" for your friends which you trust and know in person. You then restrict access to photos, personal information, contact information and status updates to this ONE group of friends.

I do this, and it means that only a small % of my complete friends list can see my details.

Those people are people I trust with my details.

Everyone else is limited to just my wall and some select info. It isnt hard to do, but im worried if they change it, it will become dumped down to the point of being useless.

The current restrictions work IMO.

Principles of Privacy 101

Facebook needs to start with some clear principles of privacy. I suggest that Principle #1 should be a simple application of the Golden Rule for the default privacy setting. If someone wants to see some of my personal information, then they should agree to show the corresponding personal information to me. Only after we both agree should any information be shared.

The sharing of information should NOT be transitive or transferable, and Facebook should be actively looking for anyone who is actively trying to cheat. For example, it might make sense for someone to spend a lot of time looking in some detail at the information about one actual friend, but it makes no sense for someone to be scanning lots of personal information at robotic harvesting speeds.

The underlying principle should be that I own my personal information, and anyone else should be allowed to access it only with my permission--which I can revoke at any time and for any reason. Of course, that revocation can only be in principle in these days of easy copying, but the principle of ownership needs to be established, and any abuse of personal information needs to be regarded as a crime.

You don't think so? Okay, then start telling me all of your personal information and see how it feels. Have you EVER made a serious mistake? I bet you have, and I bet that you wouldn't want to have it widely publicized. Even if you're as pure as Caesar's wife, if I know enough about your personal likes and interests and even your strengths, then I guarantee that I could find some way to twist you like a pretzel.

Maybe the secret masters of Facebook are right and privacy is already dead. If so, freedom died with it and we need to schedule a nice funeral.

'Simplified' privacy controls = FAIL

They're hardly 'simplified'. They're just slightly less stupidly complicated than the old ones. Just because you don't deep-fry a Mars Bar doesn't suddenly make it 'healthy'.

And try this : Go to the privacy settings for Applications and Websites. Go to 'Information accessible through your friends' and see that everything is unchecked, as it should be. Now turn off platform applications completely and then turn them back on again. Now go back to 'Information accessible through your friends'. Oh look! All those boxes have been checked again.

Granularity Roolz KO (sic)

SNS is almost right. Key word being "almost".

I've got a list for work colleagues, a list for family, a list for mates, and so on. Friends from one list, cannot see posts from friends in another list. This part of it is not difficult to do at all.

However, the "custom settings" only allow for one set of permissions to be in effect - so for example you can set it so that every single app-generated post in the entire macrouniverse of Facebook is shown to mates and hidden from your work colleagues by default, but you then have to manually amend every single post from every single app if you want it to be shown to work colleagues and hidden from your mates.

What's wrong with making those permissions app-specific?

A second issue is, you can hide the "Friends" box from your profile page but this is a bit pointless given there's a "show all" link in "Mutual Friends". And you can't hide the "Mutual Friends" box.

If the reg listened to its users, this title would not be required.

Now if we could just the option to hide profile pictures back (which the article incorrectly claims was always visible. It was not, that changed in the recent big change.) then we will be almost back to being able to do what we could do before.

The only thing that was ever shared at all times up until last years big change was your name. Nothing else was forced to be shared. I don't care if the profile picture makes it easier to find people. It should be the users choice if that is shared with all or not. I can't even imagine why they thought making pages you follow public to all. You would have to be a complete moron to not recognize how that cold cause a big privacy problem, but hey this is facebook, so oh well.

Hahahahah

they change the security settings so often that even when we make our changes next week they say they have new and better settings and i go in and find my settings back at default as if thats their way to keep sharing our info with the advertisers.

Once we make a change it need to be cemented against ANY CHANGE

Got so frustrated that I expressed my views and they banned me from facebook.

GOOD!