Hi Rukshan here, I started this WordPress blog to write longer posts because it’s a pain to use Tumblr to write long posts, even you used a post friendly theme the editor is not good for long posts. So I’ll be using this blog to write my long posts and my normal short posts which I post most of the time will be at my Tumblr blog. http://crashzone.tumblr.com.
I was writing a different post before this but after seeing what happened today I thought of writing this. If you are an internet user there is a high chance that you are using social networks like Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare etc. Most of these social networks are free, but most people don’t realize what we are giving up when we using something something like Facebook for free, that’s our privacy.
I’m writing this post because one of my friends learnt it in the hard way when one of the pictures she has posted on Facebook got posted in an adult website. Even with tight Facebook privacy settings and not adding any unknown friends on Facebook still she had to face such an unfortunate situation.
Facebook privacy settings is pretty complex as I can see it, have you seen tagged photos of your friends appearing on Facebook news feed? Recently I made this comment in an HackersNews thread.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5465374
Facebook is pretty complicated. For example today i had an experience like this. A friend of mine posted a photo and tagged me in it. And a friend of the friend who originally posted the photo liked it. Although the photo is a photo of me and my friend because the friend who liked the photo has a privacy setting which makes everything he likes is public the photo i’m tagged now is public and anyone who is following the person who liked the photo can now see it.
I hope this made sense i tried to keep it simple bs possible. True incident happened to me today
And I got a reply from some one working at Facebook.
It is quite a bit easier than you make it sound. The photo will have been posted with a audience selected – something like “Only Me”, “Friends”, “Public”. If people were tagged in the photo and it is set to “Friends”, then those tagged and their friends can see it (the audience selector will put a little “(+)” there to let you know it has expanded it to friends of those tagged).
You can also use a custom audience selector to do things like specify a friends list (or more) to share with, not to share with friends of those tagged, and so forth.
Here is a link to the help page on privacy basics that starts with setting/modifying audience for posts: https://www.facebook.com/help/325807937506242/
If somebody likes that photo, that like will only be visible to those that can already see that photo. It does not give anybody the ability to see the photo that did not already.
In many cases, you can see the audience selected for posts your friends make by looking for the same icons from the audience selector next to the date and other metadata in your news feed, their timeline, or the picture page. If it is public, there’ll be a little globe. If friends, then it’ll be two people standing next to each other. If friends-of-friends, three people standing there. Obviously, you can’t tell if it was shared with only them (since you wouldn’t see it). In some cases (the person chose a custom audience), a gear icon will appear.
If after you investigate based on the information above you really think the privacy model expanded who could see the photo because of the like, please report a privacy bug: https://www.facebook.com/help/contact/?id=308229232560802
(In case it wasn’t obvious, I work at Facebook. But I don’t work on privacy specifically.)
The explanation makes sense but, I have come across 2,3 times where the original poster has posted photos visible to tagged friends only, but I can see these photos because the friend who got tagged has set the privacy setting so tagged photos are visible to all her friends.
It’s not Facebook’s fault or social networking fault. I think it’s how people are using it that’s wrong. People must know what’s to post and what’s not post on Facebook, Twitter or any other social network. I think people are yet to realize the internet is no different to real life society, I think people still think that internet is a closed space where everyone on the internet are same and white. But what most people don’t see is the darker internet filled with peudoes, molesters, porn lovers, psychopaths, hackers, identity thieves and the dark web itself.
Unlike the real world internet gives them power to come in whatever form they like, because thanks to the internet it’s so easy to make a fake identity on the internet within few minutes.
Do we talk to strangers that we meet? Do we show our photos to everyone we meet in the street? Do we tell everyone out there where we are going and where we are? No, because it’s not safe to do that. The internet is no different, but for some reason people don’t understand this difference.
So they post things freely on the web and when you find yourself in trouble it might be too late, although people like Robert Scoble downplays online privacy it’s much more serious than that.
And one must not forget that what’s posted on the web stays on the web, what we post today might be downloaded 100 times, posted shared and reposted on different, different websites and even if it’s without out consent then there is no way to stop it.
So people take online privacy seriously, and when posting something on the web think twice or even more than that whether you should post this or not. And post or share things that only needed to be shared, if it’s not necessary to post it then don’t post it. Because once you posted on the internet it stays on the internet. Protect your privacy and stay safe.
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