Almost every week I continue to be shocked at some aspect of how Facebook is treating the privacy of their users. While I think Facebook has done some amazing things to redefine the landscape of connection and community in the digital age, the way they auto-opt-in users to new policies and settings that unwittingly further expose them in a manner that is beyond confusing for almost everyone is driving me crazy.

It seems to be a total disregard for privacy that leverages "confuser interface design" tactics and misleading redesign functionality alterations to extend their dominance at the unknowing expense of most of their users. They actively seek to get you to enter as much personally defining data as possible. They make it incredibly complicated to manage your assorted privacy settings, then they go and make significant changes that auto-opt in users to new options like making all of your posts available to search engines or to share your personal data with applications and sites using FaceBook tools. All of this while presenting typical users with a perception of communicating and sharing with their "Friends." Maybe FaceBook is just working towards a Nobel Peace Prize by wanting everybody on the planet and every corporation to be Friends? Ummmm.... no.

Conversely, while not exempt from scrutiny, Twitter takes a much different approach. They begin by having an established perception that what you post is public, they have one very clear and simple blanket option to make your posts private, and the information they ask you to enter for registration is extremely limited.

I'm also driven crazy by the constant changes to FaceBook API's that make the lives of developers miserable as they struggle to work with this juggernaut of social media and the fact that they employed algorithms that began to selectively decide whose posts among my friends they thought I should see (and even excluded my wife's posts from my stream until I manually added her back in)... but that's a whole other couple of blog posts to write. The following is a short list of things I actually find less annoying than FaceBook's treatment of the concept of privacy:

15.       SPAM e-mail

14.       People who post their every Foursquare or Gowalla check-in to Twitter

13.       The mere existence of Farmville and Mafia Wars

12.       The first time I saw Clippy

 
      11.    Developers that hardcode and use auto-code generators out of laziness

10.       Requirements documents for a web site or app that say: "should work in every browser"

9.       Web sites that dramatically over-use Flash for everything they possibly can

8.       People that show up for an interview and haven't read and reviewed your company's web site or have any ability to articulate what your company does

7.       People that text or use mobile devices to tweet while driving (or drive while talking on their mobile phone without using a Bluetooth or hands-free device)

6.   People that call themselves "Social Media Gurus" in their bios or otherwise

5.   People in busy airports that obliviously stop walking out of the blue and then wonder why everyone crashes into them

4.   Every scene on the Fox TV series 24 that ever involved Kim Bauer

3.   Stupid people (as one of my friends is fond of saying as he quotes his old high school football coach, "Ya can't fix stupid.")

2.   The continued existence of IE6

1.   The constant deluge of Top <insert number here> Lists