That someone is "people" and the axe they have to grind is "stop trolling the personal data you unscrupulously collected from us in the first place by hoodwinking us into thinking you actually MEANT the meaningless drivel in your privacy policy."

I've not fully kept up with all the stories recently (been busy, I have a pretty open FB account anyway etc..) but as far as I was aware the only really problematic thing (from a privacy perspective) was the new favourites/likes etc. thing where certain things can appear on the "fan" page without you really realising.

I wasn't aware of anything else specific that was bending the privacy policy to the limit? Anyone care to fill me in on the TL;DR version?

(the social graph, as far as I saw, obeys your privacy settings)

I'm not following Facebook closely either, but two things I'm aware of:

- 3rd parties (app developers, Facebook Connect users, etc.) no longer have a 24hr limit on storing user data

- Open Graph basically means your Facebook info has the potential to be plastered all over the web if you're browsing without being logged out of Facebook

Selling all your details to advertisers.

Constantly changing what is private and what is public.

Getting upset at someone using the data that they provide to the public for research purposes.

There is more.

"Selling all your details to advertisers."

Simply, no. There is no check you can write to facebook to in order to get a particular facebook user's, or set of users', information.

Nope, they give it out for free via the graph API.

Apparently not. There are no suspicious patterns in the voting on those stories.

What a nonsense.

Facebook is acting, people are re-acting. It's only natural that facebook should come under some scrutiny, for one they're huge, secondly they behave like a bull in a china shop with respect to other peoples privacy.

You've been a HN member for all of three months and 10 days, I think it is a little early to start accusing people here of being in some kind of conspiracy against facebook.

There also is no conspiracy against apple, google, microsoft or any other big name company or website.

It happens. Facebook have made a few idiotic decisions recently and it's their turn for the [legitimate] disgruntlement (remember Google were getting it much the same).

There will be a plenty of both sensible and silly articles targeting Facebook.

Thanks, that is all I meant. People should just take this current wave of FB stories with a grain of salt.

They wouldn't be on the front page if it weren't for all the upvotes.

You got us. This article upvote has been sponsored by MySpace.com

Yikes, fellas. I wasn't trying to accuse anyone of a conspiracy. I just meant that current wave of negative FB stories in the past week seems out of proportion to the degree to which they have changed anything (privacy-related or otherwise) during that time period. The FB-bashing has become fashionable.