Facebook family pic has Zuckerberg's big sister hopping over privacy
Randi Zuckerberg — older sister of Facebook CEO Mark - has become involved in a privacy row over a family picture that started life on Facebook.
Oops! Facebook family picture
She has found that being a member of the Facebook founder’s family "won’t protect you from having your privacy breached on the social network.," reports Forbes magazine.
On Tuesday night, Randi posted a photo from a family gathering to Facebook showing her sisters using Facebook’s new 'Poke’ app on their phones.
Poke is a new mobile app that sends photos or other messages that automatically expire within seconds.
Mark Zuckerberg is watching in the background "with a confused look on his face," says Forbes.
The photo arrived on the Facebook newsfeed of New York mediaite Callie Schweitzer who subscribes to Zuckerberg. Assuming the photo was a public one, she tweeted it to her nearly 40,000 Twitter followers.
Randi Zuckerberg was not pleased, says Forbes.
“Not sure where you got this photo,” she tweeted at Schweitzer. “I posted it to friends only on FB. You reposting it to Twitter is way uncool.”
How did it happen? A friend of Schweitzer is in the photo, - so she was able to see the otherwise private photo because her friend was tagged .
“I would hate for a private photo of mine to be public and would never want to do same to others,” replied Schweitzer, deleting the photo.
However Buzzfeed picked up the photo - which Forbes called "endearing" -and posted it.
The irony is that the photo captured the Zuckerberg family using a Facebook app that exists to undermine the permanence of photos, said the mag.
With the app, users can “Poke” their friends as they did with the original Facebook feature and send messages, photos or videos. But the Poke app has the message evaporate after 1, 3, 5, or 10 seconds: it's up to the sender.
Schweitzer explained that the photo had popped up in her newsfeed. Zuckerberg then realised that she had fallen prey to Facebook’s complex privacy settings.
She pulled back on her "Internet road rage", as Forbes put it, and accepted Schweitzer’s apology in a tweet .By this point, of course, it was too late for the photo not to become news.
Zuckerberg is not the first Zuckerberg to be caught out by Facebook’s privacy settings. Back in 2009, Mark Zuckerberg had his whole profile — including photos and his events calendar — go public after a Facebook privacy setting overhaul.
After deleting her exchange with Schweitzer, older sister Zuckerberg , who previously worked at Facebook and specialises in marketing, offered Schweitzer a lesson in digital etiquette on Twitter: “Always ask permission before posting a friend’s photo publicly. It’s not about privacy settings. It’s about human decency.”
The Forbes verdict: "That’s richer than the egg nog many of us were drinking yesterday."