Mark Zuckerberg's Sister Should Just Admit She Doesn't Understand Facebook's Privacy Rules Either
from the bad-responses dept
There's been some buzz today over the news that former Facebooker, Randi Zuckerberg, who's also the older sister to Mark Zuckerberg, is among the many people who don't understand Facebook's privacy policies, as she got upset at someone for tweeting a photo that she thought she had shared in a more limited way than she really had.Digital etiquette: always ask permission before posting a friend's photo publicly. It's not about privacy settings, it's about human decency.No matter what you think of Facebook's privacy settings and the controversy they create, it seems that this response is particularly silly, and seems completely bogus. Danny Sullivan's response to her statement makes the point clear:
Sure Randy Zuckerberg asked all in her family if she could share that pic before posting. That's just human decencyI think that's the bigger point in this story. Yes, Facebook's privacy settings are complex and confusing and people get tripped up by them all the time. And, if Randi Zuckerberg were being honest, and not trying to brush this situation under the rug, she'd just admit that. Making a silly claim like it's about "human decency" to ask permission from every single person whose photo you share just seems silly. Hell, if it were true, then wouldn't Facebook change its setting so instead of an easy one-click "share" button on pretty much every photo, it would instead alert those associated with the photo and ask for permission first?
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Filed Under: decency, mark zuckerberg, privacy, randi zuckerberg
Companies: facebook
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Sure, it makes a nice emotive argument to say "ask for permission before sharing a friend's photo", but once I ask Mr. Logic to take a look at that statement, you end up advocating that Facebook have the details of every person on the planet, match their face to every photo they're in (which I believe is optional at the moment), and then force you to ask every single person in each of your photos for permission before you can post, which is of course a curtailment of free speech.
There's a few people on this site I wish would use logic before they hammer away at their keyboards...
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However, the concept and ideal of free speech is much, much larger than that and applies universally.
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If you don't pay for the product, YOU are the product.
But your ingenue pose seems to not understand that IF Facebook were in any degree an opt-in system, it'd collapse. Same with Google's tracking of you. Soon as sufficient of the pubic really grasps that those corporations are ruthlessly monetizing one's content and habits, there'll be a second dotcom bust.
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Re: If you don't pay for the product, YOU are the product.
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Re: If you don't pay for the product, YOU are the product.
Here's your "opt-in system", boy...
Don't register on FaceBook.
Problem solved.
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Re: If you don't pay for the product, YOU are the product.
Blue, read the last line of my above comment. That line applies to you, in case you can't use logic to figure that out.
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Re: Re: If you don't pay for the product, YOU are the product.
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How to Avoiding Embarrassment
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Common sense
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Re: Common sense
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The Zuckerberg's
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seriously?
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As to misinterpreting, perhaps you are right. But I've read that comment a dozen times now, and it's not the obvious interpretation of what she's saying.
Nonetheless, one part of her comment is wrong: it is indeed about the privacy settings. She could have used privacy settings to prevent this from happening. Based on her reaction, I assume that she thought she did, but failed. That's unsurprising, as FB privacy settings are byzantine and always changing.
That is the essential point of the post.
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Re: seriously?
And there's your fault right there.
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I'm not really sure she's wrong. I guess I really need to think about this one. Which is a plus-one to techdirt of course. Making people think.
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Randi Zuckerberg admits her family is not human.
Its just human decency to not bury requests to profit from others pictures and data so deep you need a mining helmet and a decoder ring to find them.
She truly is at worst a liar and at best deluded. It is perfectly okay for her to get rich doing it to you, but when she gets the same treatment it is an affront to human decency. Tell that to the guy who ended up as the face for the 50 gallon barrel of lube Randi...
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Don't understand what's so confusing
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Re: Don't understand what's so confusing
The problem here is that this is actually a subsetting. Randi set the post to go to "friends" but she didn't realize that there's ALSO a setting (buried deeper) that says that if you *tag* someone else, the image ALSO shows up for all of THEIR friends. So it went to a wider circle than she expected.
Details here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/12/26/the-facebook-privacy-setting-that-tripped-up-rand i-zuckerberg/
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Re: Re: Don't understand what's so confusing
the problem here is that if you dont want stuff getting into the hands of others/being seen on the big bad interwebs, then dont put it there to begin with.
all rules, settings and subsettings aside, the moment you put it up there, there is a chance it will be seen by people other than who you intended.
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Re: Re: Don't understand what's so confusing
I still don't have a problem understanding the settings though, though I suppose its also about how available the settings are. Even if FB left the settings basically alone, but organized the interface so it's more or less one page rather than a bunch of different sections it would be more intuitive.
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If you mean how visible, then I agree. But the other problem is that the privacy settings aren't stable. In the end, this (and the timeline) is why I cancelled my facebook account. It was too much error-prone work to browse through all the privacy settings, some hidden away in weird corners, regularly to make sure nothing's changed.
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Not that I think we should stop anonymous systems like Tor. We should have ways to surf the internet without having to say who we are. Just that our person is always fair game.
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Nope. Privacy is critically important and to simply accept that it's dead guarantees that no progress can be made in this fight.
This same argument was made regarding all kinds of things in history (slavery, civil rights, consumer rights, etc.) when those causes seemed utterly lost. Progress in them only came about because nobody gave up.
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Because she herself can't work FB's privacy settings she shared a picture much wider than she intended and had the gall to yell at someone daring to share a picture.
Ranting about human decency when SHE is actually the one at fault in the situation is pretty funny.
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The issue is that Facebook provides a mechanism to limit or prevent this, but that Zuckerberg's sister did not use them properly. That's where the privacy settings come in. Then she made the situation worse by claiming that the problem was etiquette, not privacy settings.
That may be technically true, but to expect etiquette from the internet at large either betrays a shocking level of idiocy or a complete lack of experience with the internet.
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http://www.salon.com/2012/12/26/mark_zuckerbergs_sister_is_angry_that_a_family_photo_pos ted_on_facebook_became_public/
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