Indeed. But what bumper sticker am I gonna have that I don't mind the 3.5 million people in my city's vicinity potentially seeing but I'm worried about somebody on the other side of the world seeing? I'm sure some such items can be hypothesized (though I'd still ask the person why they're putting a bumper sticker on in the first place if there's anybody they don't want seeing it), but my point is that in practice this just doesn't concern most people and it's hard for me to see why it should.
edit: I think there's perhaps a distinction here between things like personal profile information (one might not one's psycho ex to see their phone number or even wall posts, while not minding sharing them with friends) and things like fan page liking. The former certainly needs privacy controls, and they should be clearer than they currently are; the latter is hard for me to get upset about, and I think it dilutes the message of privacy advocates to mention it.
The idea that some kinds of information are more or less suitable for privacy controls is nonsensical. Say some college kid Bob is gay, but he hasn't told his parents. Bob goes to some fan page for a local GLBT organization etc, and 'becomes a fan', because previously that didn't show up on his profile where his parents might see it, and his parents wouldn't be visiting that fan page anyway. Well, now FaceBook goes and makes fan pages visible on your profile, and suddenly Bob's parents have a lot of questions for him.
You may not find yourself in that kind of situation often, but it is a very real possibility -- there was even a study done where a computer could make a highly accurate guess of whether you were gay just by looking at who is in your friends list (also public), without any information from your profile. Everything on facebook is information.
I could give you an example where the bumper sticker is also relevant, but I think the example above is enough to prove my point.
If you've got an opinion that's fine, but if you post it on here, the least I expect is for you to back it up with reasoning rather than just 'seems contradictory to me'.
My point is, that people become a 'fan' of something, in part, if not often solely to announce to other people that they're a fan. It's inherently social.
Maybe if you're a fan of something deeply unpopular - Java for example, then you'd want to keep that as private as possible.
I think it'd probably just be best for facebook to make the leap and say "OK you privacy nerds, SHUT UP. From now on, everything is public apart from private messages. Now quit your incessant whining."
When I've "become a fan" of things on Facebook it's been because I was interested in those things and wanted regular updates about them. It was not out of some kind of weird desire to flash my tailfeathers at people.
That's exactly what they have said, in not so many words. And yet people are still whining incessantly.
As for 'becoming a fan' being inherently social, that's true. The issue is whether something that's inherently social is also inherently public. Going on a date with your girlfriend is social, but you may not want it inherently public (and keep in mind there's a difference between internet public and people seeing you together at a restaurant public.
I haven't heard of any real instance of someone who had their fan pages set to not show up on their profile and ended up in some sort of bad situation when they were made public on their profile. Everyone is assuming this was done surreptitiously, but the reasonable thing for Facebook to do would be to put a huge dialog on the screen saying "Hey, you had your fan pages set to show up on your profile, but fan pages are now going to be public for everyone. Uncheck the ones you want to remove." If there's no actual case of someone complaining about this, then we don't even know if Facebook did anything wrong. Quit complaining about things that might have happened to other people.
And I suppose you would have had us write down the Bill of Rights after we lose our freedom of speech and freedom of the press? I mean, the government might not want to limit that right? Your argument is BS.
(the point isn't about the extreme of freedom of speech, but your idea that we should only worry about things that have actually happened is total garbage)
Your analogy is just wrong. You were trying to argue that a change Facebook actually made could have hurt people, but your scenario only could have happened if Facebook made the change without making it clear what was going on. If the only aspects of your argument that were hypothetical were Bob's actions, that would be something worth discussing. However, you're making it seem like what Facebook actually did could have hurt Bob, when you have no idea if that's actually the case.
That wasn't my argument at all. I was responding to this claim:
"I think there's perhaps a distinction here between things like personal profile information (one might not one's psycho ex to see their phone number or even wall posts, while not minding sharing them with friends) and things like fan page liking."
My point is that fan page liking is personal profile information. Everything you put on facebook is personal profile information. The Bob example was merely to show that 'becoming a fan' of something can reveal profile information about the person. The fact that Bob could potentially be 'hurt' in the scenario was just to make Bob sympathetic (as opposed to the all too typical scenario where people post severely racist or homophobic content without realizing how public it might be).
They already do: a comment is a response to the blog. You can post the response on the blog, which is moderately public, or you could email the author, which is more private. You could write a response on your own blog, which may be more or less private depending on whether you actually have readers, and you could conceivably go on television and broadcast your response to the whole world.
There's a difference between the kind of information (response), and the method of communication (comment on a blog).
edit: I think there's perhaps a distinction here between things like personal profile information (one might not one's psycho ex to see their phone number or even wall posts, while not minding sharing them with friends) and things like fan page liking. The former certainly needs privacy controls, and they should be clearer than they currently are; the latter is hard for me to get upset about, and I think it dilutes the message of privacy advocates to mention it.