New LJ thing.

[son_of_darkness]

Ok, I'm not sure I get the aggression, you guys. o_0 I have no particular interest in the new feature and zero desire to use it, but I don't necessarily think it's evil. In fact, for some people it could be quite useful. Most websites have a "cross post to facebook/twitter" feature these days. And hey... nothing wrong with facebook or twitter,

Comments

[pingrid]

More or less C&P of a comment I posted somewhere else, because I'm lazy. :)

It may not matter to you now that the whole world knows everything about you (I used to feel the same way), but circumstances may change (they have for me). Relevant to this, it's also an issue of conflicting user agreements/TOS. Facebook has one of the worst user agreements in the industry. Basically, when you sign up for Facebook you agree to give them ownership of every piece of text or picture you post - and that they can change those however they like and then use them for whatever they like - and that nothing there can ever be really deleted. This is in direct contrast to what you sign up for at LJ, which is to keep the intellectual rights to your content. (The fact that this is the internet and that people don't necessarily respect that is another matter.)

So that means that if someone quotes part of your post in their comment and then crossposts to FB, FB then owns that turn of phrase, even if it's posted there by someone else without your consent. That's one aspect of it, the other is that FB is notoriuos for mining personal information, and they get the link to your journal with the comment.

On the plus side (and it's horrendus that this is the _plus_side_), flocked posts won't be able to be read by people who aren't on your flist. But some people use the same aliases for all their social networking, for example - and in that case, a seemingly supportive and innocent comment like "the first thing you need to do is start squirreling away some money in your own name and documenting your injuries" posted to FB with a link to a user name can have some serious consequences. The cross-post doesn't even have to be intentional; the placement of the repost buttons is in the same place where you'd normally tab-enter to post. It's a mistake very easily made. And even without identical names, the tech savvy can get a lot of interesting things out of a link and an IP address.

So it's a HUGE privacy fail, so big that I'm not yet sure I'm willing to stay at LJ even if they do deign to respond to our complaints at some point.