[TeMPOraL]

Why wouldn't you?

I post default-public, on purpose. I welcome everyone to stalk me on Facebook as much as they like and to comment on anything that's interesting for them. I have very little personal secrets I want to limit access to, and generally live a single life. I understand it's a privileged position, as I'm just a pretty average straight, white, male, cisgendered, neuro-sort-of-typical Western geek, but I see no reason to post private when I don't need it.

I understand most people limit posts to friends or friends-of-friends (the latter is I think the default setting on Facebook now), though this kind of annoys me when I want to learn something about a person I'm not friends with and see an empty profile, or when I want to share a post from one friend to another friend (usually in a private message, in the form of "look at this insightful post or funny picture I saw on my timeline"), but the former has the post visible to his friends only, and the latter isn't friend with them. There are trivial workarounds for last case though.

EDIT: I'm not telling anyone that they should go full-public. But OP seems to be bewildered by the fact that some people do in fact keep full-public profiles on purpose.

[dennisnedry]

It's people like you who are telling the US government that it's ok to surveillance citizens. With your logic, you are saying you have no reason to hide anything, so the government can keep tabs on you. Just because you have nothing to hide doesn't mean you can become a victim of an error as well. Take this story http://www.wired.com/2015/10/familial-dna-evidence-turns-inn... where a man who "has nothing to hide" and innocent became the suspect in a murder due to him sharing similar DNA It could be you one day, you don't know.

[TeMPOraL]

Hey, I'm not telling the USGOV anything. I'm also pointing out that a lot of people have perfectly good reason to have default privacy level set to "full public", and it's neither weird or wrong. I responded to a HNer apparently bewildered by that fact.

I support you keeping whatever privacy level you like, but don't force me to hide things if I consciously, in full physical and mental capacity, decide I don't want to.

[maaku]

You are lucky.

[TeMPOraL]

I'm also the majority (sans the geek part).

In threads about Facebook I see people so focused on various minorities and corner cases that they act surprised by behaviour of people on Facebook, even though said behaviour is perfectly ok for the vast majority of Facebook's users. I think it's good to remind everyone that not everyone wants everything they do to be as private as possible, or has a reason to. In fact, most users don't.