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A comment on Poll: Facebook usage. Parent comment

Re:Poll: Facebook usage by dreamux on Sunday September 25, 2011 @12:32AM (#3035095)
You're right that sucks. But if you think about it it's probably more of a technical issue than evil policy, just imagine the permission graph for visiting one of your friend's profiles -- FB would have to do a reverse lookup of all of you friend's friends and filter ones with closed photo sharing (or what if you are a friend common to both?). Further, scaling that out to 750M people is non-trivial.

Anyways, I'm not excusing their policy, but I expect they'll fix it whenever it is technically possible to do so.

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Re:Poll: Facebook usage by eftpotrm on Sunday September 25, 2011 @07:13AM (#3035594)
No, it's not significantly more difficult than the existing case.

You have one permissions set - my permissions on my photos. And another permissions set - my friends' visibility sets on their tagging. The display set is the interaction between these two sets, which any database developer should be trivially able to calculate.

I don't for one minute dispute that the scaling issues for calculating these interactions for 750m users are significant, but the core task definitely isn't.

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