Facebook Privacy Settings are a Rube Goldberg experience

Facebook Privacy Settings are a Rube Goldberg experience

Rube Goldberg was an engineer better known as the cartoonist that drew hilariously complex machines to solve mundane problems.
Facebook’s privacy settings are themselves a Rube Goldberg like apparatus. For example, I originally thought that setting my post settings to “Friends” (which Facebook sometimes restricts to Friends+, which is basically the same as Public if you think about it) would protect my privacy.
But alas, no. Facebook has tons of privacy settings, each hidden away in a different location, buried under menu selections and mouse clicks.
For example, who knew that under Settings | Ads there was an additional set of privacy options related to apps and advertising, separate from the other privacy settings?
Facebook is intentionally designed to make it hard to hide your personal data, and nearly impossible to delete your data. In effect, Facebook can say you control your privacy and your data. While in reality making it as difficult as impossible do either.
Or, it is possible that Facebook hires not very bright people and this is the best user interface design they could come up with. I am leaning towards the saying “Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by simple incompetence”. In other words, Facebook has not hired the best and the brightest.

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