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by Meph504 3043 days ago
Well as far as legal protections go, nothing definitive, and they can always argue their statements about enhancing user experience would cover this.

Check westlaw on it https://content.next.westlaw.com/6-502-0467?transitionType=D...

I think the real issue, is people think they are doing one thing, but doing another.

depending on the age of your account, you'll notice that the notifications for SMS maybe defaulted on, this didn't matter if you didn't have a phone number associated with your account. When you add a phone number to your account, its not "solely" 2FA, you add the number to your account, and 2Fa is enabled, just like all the other default setting that apply to phone numbers.

which is why when people are responding to the SMS its posting on their wall, its because what their settings are set to do.

see the settings below where they can disable this. https://imgur.com/a/6pOHH

It's another case of people screaming to the heavens about evil megacorp. when in reality they can't be bothered to check their own settings.

2 comments

> It's another case of people screaming to the heavens about evil megacorp. when in reality they can't be bothered to check their own settings.

Facebook's settings are often opaque and unintuitive, and some of the stuff around notifications qualifies as dark patterns. Also, as you mentioned, Facebook has a history of using selfishly-chosen defaults which are often not what a user would likely want or expect.

I'm not going to fault people for complaining about getting tricked into settings they didn't want.

I won't defend their practices in most cases, changing the news feed to recent for example is far more work than it should be, and reverts randomly.

but this setting is Settings>Notifications it's not really buried.

I suppose I'm not upset at people who discovered the issue, but I am annoyed at mashable.com for making it a specifical when it shouldn't be, quoting a "a self-described technosociologist, professor at UNC" and their uninformed statements.

Another Facebook dark pattern: they hid everybody's email addresses from their profile and showed a new @facebook.com email address. They claimed they had simply introduced a new setting letting you show or hide email addresses individually. However, it was already possible to set the privacy on an email address to "only me", effectively hiding it.