I think the only reason this hasn't become a monster shitstorm is because the vast majority of users don't realise how their page looks to people who aren't their friends, and don't yet know how exposed they are.
It's also hard to spot the changes to profile picture settings unless you notice that in search results you can now click on the profile picture: the page otherwise looks identical to how it did before, when you couldn't.
I was bitten by this, and consider myself fairly savvy. I carefully read the entire new settings roadblock, and made sure all of my old settings were kept. Nonetheless, a day or two later I double-checked, and after drilling down four levels, discovered that all of my profile pictures were set to "friends of friends", which is massively too loose.
Facebook wants to open up, but has it forgotten that it only became the size it did because it was the first place on the web that older and untechnologically savvy people felt they could trust with their personal pictures and data?
They break that trust at their -- and our -- peril. People burnt by the exposure of pictures they thought only a private and vetted list of people could see will be very wary of trusting any of the services some of us are trying to build.
Actually, I believe album privacy was not affected by this change at all.
Go here : http://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=privacy§ion=pr... - notice there's a separate setting for Photo Albums. That (the album privacy) interface has existed for at least a year. Your profile photos should be an album under there.
Photos /of/ you, where you've been tagged is a separate setting that is called out on that page, which I believe was in the recent privacy changes dialog.
A further confusion is that the current Profile picture is publicly available information, as per the recent changes.
This was definitely poorly communicated in the changes dialog; hopefully these things will get better in further iterations.
You can click on the 'Preview as' button to see your profile as it will appear to another user.
Well, we've got a facebook clone here (vk.com) where the profile is open by default and the growth rate is not worse than of the Facebook. (Taking into account the language of the network).
So I think that the growth of the Facebook has nothing to do with the privacy settings.
It's also hard to spot the changes to profile picture settings unless you notice that in search results you can now click on the profile picture: the page otherwise looks identical to how it did before, when you couldn't.
I was bitten by this, and consider myself fairly savvy. I carefully read the entire new settings roadblock, and made sure all of my old settings were kept. Nonetheless, a day or two later I double-checked, and after drilling down four levels, discovered that all of my profile pictures were set to "friends of friends", which is massively too loose.
Facebook wants to open up, but has it forgotten that it only became the size it did because it was the first place on the web that older and untechnologically savvy people felt they could trust with their personal pictures and data?
They break that trust at their -- and our -- peril. People burnt by the exposure of pictures they thought only a private and vetted list of people could see will be very wary of trusting any of the services some of us are trying to build.