Matt McKeon

> I do want to point out that Google+, with old features or new, has never violated the ACLs that users set. If you set something to private, it remains private forever.

I know that, which is why I used the example of Facebook.

However, Google+ does make it incredibly easy to leak information that I would otherwise consider private accidentally.

For example, I can't use Google+ with my primary email address, as it's a Google+ account. However, because it's linked with my Gmail account (which does have a Google+ account), some people who have added me on Google+ have been able to figure out my Gmail address (which I haven't used for email purposes in years[0]).

I can imagine all the technical reasons for this, but that doesn't change the fact that it feels a bit wrong for a service to hand out my old email address (which I never give out anymore) to people I've met recently and who have added me on Google+ using my current email address.

Imagine your Google+ email address is something that you can't change, but don't really want people to see anymore - this isn't uncommon; it appeared in a New York Times piece just yesterday, in the context of college admissions[1]. Thankfully, my personal email address is much more tame than that student's, but that still doesn't mean I want anybody to know or use it nowadays.

Furthermore, it's incredibly easy to sign up "accidentally" to use Youtube with Google+ and your "real name" instead of continuing to use your pseudonym.

As for…

I think Facebook is getting beat on because it's in the middle of a media maelstrom and under a lot of scrutiny as a result. I also think it deserves every bit of it and many of its social media peers do too (LinkedIn is basically Facebook with even more "dark patterns").

Regarding some of the specific comments you're seeing repeated - yes "you are the product" gets trotted out a lot - but it's basically correct, isn't it? You haven't offered any counter-argument here. Pointing out that Facebook's material incentives are absolutely not aligned with those of their users is always going to be relevant when discussing how Facebook handles user data.

Facebook could minimize the data they gather instead of maximizing it, they could give users fine-grained control over what data "partners" get to use/target, they could make the defaults for many options private. There's no incentive to do any of this though - so in many cases they do the opposite [1].

[1] http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/

> Facebook started with the "let it all hang out" model and then grafted privacy on later

That's not actually correct history. Facebook started with most data visible only to your friends, and gradually increased the visibility (given default settings) over time. You can track the changes here:

http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/

Also, when Facebook launched it was exclusive to Harvard, and then to Ivy League colleges, and then to all colleges, and even for a while after they opened it up it was still mostly young people. Your friends list was a closer match to your peer group. So it's possible that the audience people used to get with a friends-only post a few years ago isn't all that different from the audience you get with a secret group today. I remember when I was first finding out about Facebook around early 2009, it had the distinct feel of a private social club.

> "But this aspect isn't basically the issue of publishing? If you post your Facebook status/photos and mark them publicly visible, you're a publisher."

Sure, that's part of it. However, the issue is that Facebook have tried to increase what constitutes public Facebook content over time.

Here are a couple of links about this:

http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/

https://www.eff.org/en-gb/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-timeline

You also have another group of privacy invasions enabled by the phone apps from Facebook:

https://en-gb.facebook.com/help/210676372433246

http://fortune.com/2015/11/09/facebook-photo-scanning/

I'm sure I could find other privacy issues with Facebook. Can you opt-out of all of this? Probably, but it certainly requires vigilance by its users, especially when new features are rolled out.

Pretty disingenuous. People can change. AND we dont have a timeline. Facebook kept pushing more and more info public, in an attempt to make facebook more useful. ( http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/ ) Then they saw they went too far and quietly scaled it back. Four years later they got burned by mistakes they already knew they made and had already started taking action on.

There's multiple issues at foot: when he knew, how he reacted, and why he didn't disclose. He could have absolutely found out, ordered changes, and tried to keep it quiet, and later learned what a mistake it was to keep quiet.

Have you seen the (now quite ancient) animated evolution of default Facebook privacy settings[1]? It's insane.

It's for this reason that, by default, I assume essentially everything I do online is public. My username is my name, almost everything on Facebook is defaulted to public, etc.

If you live under the assumption that you're never private, you'll never make the mistake of thinking you are.

[1]: http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/