I generally don't do much with Facebook. I have an account to which I will add just about anyone that I've ever known as a "friend", my account is set up to read in my public LJ posts as "Notes", and I have basic biographical information contained therein. To me, this doesn't represent a privacy threat any higher than any other place where I have a public persona.

When I got my new phone, I set up the Facebook application that came with it mainly out of curiosity. It turns out to mostly be full of stupid crap, but I do periodically respond to things people post when I feel the inclination. Yesterday, I did so in a snarky response to someone from highschool. It was at this time that I became aware of an interesting feature of Facebook.

When you post a comment to a public post, the fact of that comment becomes part of your public activity feed and is shown to your friends. In fact, this means that one of your friends can see the original post even if they aren't in the appropriate friend graph of the original poster, so long as the privacy settings on the original post are public enough. It seems that what this means is that it would be possible to create an arbitrarily long series of comments to an original post as each new poster widens the "social radius" to which that post is available. For a sufficiently interesting commentable post, it seems completely reasonable to believe that a post could be commented on by someone who is three or four degrees of seperation from even knowing the original poster.

In my particular case above, I posted a comment about something someone I knew from highschool said and it was responded to by someone that I knew from college. The original poster and the ultimate commenter were not friends and, in fact, had never met. Is this a useful feature? I think that is something that hasn't yet been determined.

Published by XPost^curses