Facebook has reworded the notification that appears when a user hits the ‘x’ associated with stories in their Mini-Feed. The dialog box now simply reads, “Hiding will remove the story from your Mini-Feed.”
The change comes four days after we reported on the misleading nature of the old dialog box. Previously, the box stated that by removing a story, users would “prevent anyone from seeing it”. Most people assumed this applied both to the Mini-Feed tied to their profile and to the stories that would be sent to their friends, but this was not the case.
This change is clearly a quick fix on Facebook’s part, and it does little to alleviate the real issue at hand. The new notification box may be less misleading, but Facebook users are still left without a way to control which stories are being sent to their friends.
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Wow, this is some seriously important news.
how come fb never do things to make us have more faith in them? I can’t say they are not honest, but I feel that they try to take advntage on ppl who are careless or care less than the others.
honest. maybe you didn’t have it 4 yrs ago, please get some now.
@pte - It’s called money.
BREAKING NEWS!!!
lol you must be really boring to publish that.. or just promoting fb as a daily basis??
Pte, I really don’t think that they are trying to take advantage of anyone intentionally. It probably has a lot to do with the fact that the people that are making the site think differently than most people. To them, it makes perfect sense to do it the way they did, and word it they way they did. It wasn’t some master plot to make people think they’re hiding something when they really aren’t. I can’t say I disagree with how they did it, either. The mini-feed is a different beast than the main feed, and how people use them are different. If I take something out of my mini-feed, why should it automatically remove it from the main one? Maybe I did a bunch of photo updating, and didn’t want it clogging up my mini-feed, but still want that pushed out to the main feed. I could clean up the feed on my profile and not worry about my friends having to visit my profile to see that I’ve done these updates. I think it all comes back to a different thought process between the people making it and the masses using it.
The question is, do _most_ people care that much and if so, does this open the door for another social net to challenge fb?
Couldn’t you just change the email address associated with Facebook and correct this problem for yourself? How will they know where else you’ve signed if you don’t have a matching email address. (On the flip side, this means you could screw around with people by buying movie tickets to weird films and inputting their email address, knowing that it would then show up on their mini-feed.)
@Jason I was thinking the same thing! I’m surprised this justified an entire post.
@Jeremy i’d like to think that my Mini-feed is an subset of the News Feed.. anything directly related to me would be fed into my mini-feed.. and if it doesn’t show up in my mini-feed.. it shouldnt show up in the news feed.. in mine or in other’s..
You can always control your privacy settings to stop others seeing your mini-feed… but does that affect the mini feed that’s published on everybody’s home page? Eish
The problem is that offering the ability to “remove from other feeds” will give a false sense of security — someone could write a desktop app to continuously scrape News Feeds, alerting people to the deleted ones.
uhhh is this really important?
Thanks for the news, that’s some important stuff. I’m gon’ try it now…
(open another tab)
- Log on to facebook
- Try it….
Yep, it works guys, thanks for the news.
my jaw hit the floor when i read that headline. almost spilled coffee on myself.
cool
Hello
thansk for the updates
Yeh, did you seriously just get paid to write this post?
Well for sure your “earlier post” made them change the text if that is what you are trying to say , but I seen that coming anyways because many people got complained.
Yet I would love to be able delete some of the posts from facebook….
wow… a billion dollar feature.
Facebook repositions login button by 5 pixels, news at 11
Would FB really want users to have control over the information sent to their friends?
Talk about hiding things.
Come take a look at The Hidden Dark Side of Wikipedia
http://www.igorthetroll.com/bl.....mediation/
See with your own eyes what happens when Mediation is Broken!
The Cloaked Wikipedia
I actually think this is a good article, and I also share the concern for ambiguity in what OTHER people see about you. The biggest problem is that it is very confusing to to understand what info is/isn’t hidden.
I think a good solution would be to give people a “pseudo” profile view where (while logged into your account) you can have the option to see your profile/feed as if you were your:
a) Friend
b) Network
c) Any facebook user
d) Public
This way you’ll know exactly is being shown/posted.
Will this happen? I seriously doubt it.
Until then, I will try to grasp what I can from the privacy controls since I want to use facebook more instead of trying to handle twittering, flickr uploads, vimeo uploads, IM away messages, blog posts etc etc it just gets out of hand…
Thanks Techcrunch for the article.
You know I think I’m starting to buy into those claims made by some of your readers that you guys probably have a secret deal/interest/relationship with Facebook. This is by no means considered news.
@Jay
Actually, there was a pretty strong response to the previous story on this. The miscommunication between Facebook and its users is a big deal, and the fact that they’ve taken notice of the issue is certainly worthy of a story.
And I’m afraid I have no secret agenda. Mark Zuckerberg isn’t even my Facebook friend
Guys, guys…guys. Listen…I have some very important news to tell you all. Facebook just got 500 new users in the last ten minutes. Seriously. You can use me as a source.
“Facebook users are still left without a way to control which stories are being sent to their friends.”
Not quite true, Jason. We can debate whether users should have a way to control individual stories, but they can prevent pretty much anything from appearing in the news feed by category via their privacy settings. If you want to say, take yourself out of a relationship without broadcasting it, uncheck “Remove my Relationship Status” on this page.
The total lack of respect for my privacy has resulted in me not posting anything to facebook anymore. Everything you click on, upload, say, join, unjoin, comment on, app you visit, install, uninstall, relationship status you change, update, add, or other misc crap you might even buy from other merchants isn’t immediately broadcast to the entire world.
Jason, is this really “taking notice?” It seems to me that the real story is that users have no way of knowing what is being sent to their friends without asking me or by creating a second account. That is, you can only control your own profile and FB is deciding which of that (if any) is sent to other people.
Heck, that may even be part of their business plan, to completely mediate users’ relationships for advertising purposes. Think about it, if FB is the gatekeeper of information between friends, then they can insert whatever they want between them. They’d be stupid not to use that power (which they are demonstrating to have preserved with this story) for advertising.
GREAT article. No joke.
I had no idea about this, and thank god I found out.
This is one of Facebook’s more important features (a key differentiator to other social networking sites), so I think it is important for them to find out how people feel about this.
So, if anyone is reading this from Facebook then please fix this ASAP, or I would consider closing my account… j/k, but please put this fix at the top of your enhancement list…
@EH
I agree about the privacy issue being the ‘real story’ here. But I suspect that changing the way that Mini-Feed and News Feed interact will take longer than a few days - they seem to be pretty complex. The change in wording is hopefully just a temporary fix (if you can call it that).
step it up tc, no one cares about this
Facebook is egregious. Zuckerberg’s abuse of user goodwill and his poorly cloaked prioritization on dollars over user satisfaction and privacy are beyond frustrating. If the universe if good and fair he will suffer from it. Yet I’m starting to question whether this will ever be the case.
Those using farcebook are just asking for it.
Jason (Kincaid), there is no evidence that the interaction between Mini-Feed and News Feed is going to change at all.
Wow, a lot of commenters are acting like 13-year-olds. Yeesh.
Jason, Thanks for posting this as an update to the previous story.
Great that you covered this story Jason, but with so many issues being discussed at the Developers’ Forum regarding Slide and Rock You!, why this?
Just cannot understand why the media is keeping quiet about this…
It’s true that a small rewording is not necessarily big news, but if that’s your reaction to this story, then your kind of missing the point. The way I see it, the previous wording was little more than a lie, the fact that they’ve change the wording after TechCrunch reported on the issue is a big deal in my eyes.
It’s shame that it seemed to take a report from TechCrunch to get some action taken on this issue, as I’ve been raising concern in the developer forums, bug reports, and a Facebook group for a while now. Still, seeing any action is a start.
I actually hope that the change in wording will raise awareness of the issue, as now that users aren’t being told it will prevent anyone from seeing the story, they may make more of a fuss about the fact that you can’t prevent people from seeing it.
Oh, and once again, the Facebook group to join if you’re concerned about this privacy issue:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=7967973537
Thanks Luke. I’m planning a surprise trip this summer and my didn’t want my girlfriend to know, but now she’s like “why are you in all these groups”
In the ultimate irony I joined that group against this practice (and now she’ll know that too)
Thanks Luke. I’m planning a surprise trip this summer and my didn’t want my girlfriend to know, but now she’s like “why are you in all these groups”
In the ultimate irony I joined that group against this practice (and now she’ll know that too)…
@ Luke -
Just happened yesterday. Something was posted on my News Feed with absolutely NO WAY to retrieve it… that killed.
I can see your point, with what you say. Add a lot of this “omgs” and people are REALLY going to react. Better they find out now and not later, when it is too late.
So many issues…