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[shreena]

While I don't think that livejournal's latest facebook/twitter thing is very sensible on their part or useful, all it does is draw our attention to something that is already the case: that posting personal things on livejournal entails trusting your friends' list. Before this change, if I felt like it, I could have cut and pasted your innermost

Comments

[absinthecity]

*nod* there's always the argument that if you don't want people to see it, don't post it. However LJ has historically nurtured a culture in which people do post stuff that's semi-private (its graded security function is now widely seen as LJ's "USP") and I think it's short-sighted of the owners to completely disregard that. It's worth noting as well that people do pay for it.

That aside, as you say, anyone can maliciously copy and re-post confidential information from anywhere on the internet. This development doesn't change that fact, but it does make it a little too easy for a cross-posting situation to occur by accident (and I think it's fair to say that incompetence is more common than malice), and I think that's a fundamental change to the system that (purely from a business perspective) is a real own-goal for LJ. People will feel paranoid about this issue to leave, and/or cancel their subscription. So it's worth stating and objection, I think, just to try and get them to take the feature away from locked posts.

However, I do agree with you on the 'paranoia' thing to an extent, particularly having read a number of panicked posts on my f'list, where people have issued a 'warning' to their readers not to cross-post any of their stuff. I think it's pretty untrusting and actually rather rude to start accusing and threatening your own friends on this issue before anything has even happened. Complain to LJ, sure, but I think the "cross-post me and I'll cut you" posts that have appeared are actually pretty nasty. If you don't trust someone that much, don't have them as a friend, surely?