They have responded to the criticism of their historical behavior and now only make changes with quite a bit of fanfare. They haven't done anything overtly evil related to privacy in a while.
"Facebook hasn't abused their users much in a while, so I trust them to never do so again ever" is pretty fucking slim for someone whose career or life could be endangered.
Exactly. I have been let go (with a good package, though) from a dream job over a single personal comment from a long-time friend, who happened to work for a rival company. "You're friends irl with NNN? Sorry we have to let you go, cannot have risks like this when planning this merger". Hello, depression.
It's possible to use Facebook in a way that couldn't endanger your life or career, depending on who you are. Obviously if someone is stalking you or something, that's a different story. But most people can just omit the information that they find to be sensitive and limit their friends list to people they trust.
> It's possible to use Facebook in a way that couldn't endanger your life or career, depending on who you are. Obviously if someone is stalking you or something, that's a different story.
It's the story in the article we're discussing, in fact.
First sentence of the fucking article: "Facebook claims its practice of forcing users to go by their 'real names' (or 'authentic identities' as Facebook spins it) makes the social network a safer place."
Second sentence of the fucking article: "In fact, the company has often claimed that the policy protects women who use the social media platform, even when faced with community advocates pointing out that the policy facilitates harassment, silencing, and even physical violence towards its most vulnerable users."
If Facebook claimed that its practice of forcing users to go by their real names endangered some of those users and it consciously warned those users about the danger of posting personal information on facebook, that would be one thing. But it seems like they are doing the opposite.
I'm really not sure what point you're making here. Everyone will be affected differently by these rules as subject to their scenario. There's no way to make a general statement by Facebook for their entire 1B+ user base.
I do believe for the vast majority it does make things safer but if YOUR particular situation is different, then yes, use privacy settings, or dont be on Facebook or dont be online at all.
All the blame here seems to be toward Facebook somehow exposing information when every single step of that information getting out there is completely voluntary and has a massive amount of privacy control available.
Failure to use the right service in the right way rests on the user, not the service.
"Political dissidents and abuse victims can't safely use Facebook" is the problem we're discussing. I take it your solution is "political dissidents and abuse victims shouldn't be using the internet at all"?
If using your real name gets you in trouble for X reason then what does Facebook have to do with it? Using your real name anywhere would get you in trouble.
So then Facebook is obviously not the right place for it if you need strong anonymity. Again, what is the blame on Facebook as if they came in and registered your name and profile by force? Choose wisely for your scenario, that's all I'm saying.
> They have responded to the criticism of their historical behavior and now only make changes with quite a bit of fanfare. They haven't done anything overtly evil related to privacy in a while.
That's great. Are you willing to risk your physical safety on this?
Should other people be willing to risk theirs? If not, what if they are part of your real-life social circle, but because of this they cannot join the private FB group-chat thing that happens to be the main mode of communication for this social group? What if they might have reservations discussing their reasons not being able to join?
Sure, but users who are legitimately concerned about privacy would be pretty foolish to rely on Facebook's settings, which was the comment I replied to. It's not like we're talking about behavior from 20 years ago.
To be fair, I don't think those users should trust any service's privacy settings. Facebook is almost certainly better than, say, Ashley Madison. But I think most of us would ridicule a "real names only" policy proposed by Ashley Madison, even though they haven't had a major privacy violation since their last CEO.
