[trestacos]

I think Charles is right to be concerned about the current state of privacy in social media, but I take issue with his statement that facebook is deliberately making it harder to make your content private. If you click on Privacy setting in facebook today the first thing you're greeted with is a big control asking you if you want your profile to be public /friends/custom. But first you have to care enough to click on it.

Building social network privacy controls is not an easy problem b/c people don't want to do the extra work that's involved in setting privacy on things that they post AND it's confusing. Most people just don't want to choose a circle for their 300 fb friends.

Facebook has gone through many iterations of privacy controls - https://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=391922327130 goes into some of that history. Some of them even included google circle-like functionality for privacy. No one used them.

I'm not saying that these controls couldn't be improved, but the point here is that privacy controls take work from users. Until society as a whole is aware of these issues (and Girls Around Me does a great job of it :), people aren't going to invest the time to do it.

TL;DR - building privacy controls are hard. The industry as a whole needs to improve them, but society also needs to learn to care about their privacy so they actually use what's available to them.