[makecheck]

This is kind of how I felt when originally using Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.; sure they have dozens of “privacy settings” but (1) I did not really want to spend hours checking all the boxes a certain way, (2) they could change at any time, e.g. some awful new setting would invariably appear, naturally with an equally-awful default value (from the user’s point of view), and (3) there is no guarantee these things are coded correctly.

For (3), there’s a pretty good chance just from code rot that your “settings” may not always work. Certainly not if some company’s entire business model seems to depend on the more anti-consumer values for “settings”, you can bet they will not heavily invest in testing their accuracy.

And the real problem for privacy-related settings is that if they ever fail to protect you, even being buggy for just a short period of time, your information is then out there. Leaked. Gone. Even if you close the barn door, the animals have left. It is the type of software that has to be working 100% of the time to really protect data.

So I don’t really want privacy “settings”, I want privacy, period. That should be the default and only behavior, where the user has the only keys.