Business

Even Zuck’s sis can’t get FB privacy rules

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It’s hard to keep photos private when you post them to Facebook, as one family — the Zuckerbergs — found out the hard way.

Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg’s older sister, Randi, complained yesterday when one of her Twitter followers publicly posted a photo of the family, including her famous brother, standing in the kitchen reacting to the company’s new Poke app.

“Not sure where you got this photo,” Randi tweeted in response @cschweitz. “I posted it only to friends on FB. You reposting it on Twitter is way uncool.”

It turns out that not even Randi — Facebook’s former marketing director — is up to speed on the site’s often-confusing privacy settings. Her gaffe provided fodder for critics of the site, which in the past has changed its policies with little warning and to the dismay of users.

“We’ve all been dealing with loss of privacy in Facebook, now she feels what we all do everyday,” one Twitter user responded.

Recently, photo-sharing app Instagram, which was acquired by Facebook, had to backtrack after it changed its policies to allow it to use photos in ads without notice.

Randi posted the photo to select Facebook friends, not realizing that the photo was only as private as the privacy settings of the people she tagged in the photo, whose friends also saw it.

One of those friends of friends, Callie Schweitzer, director of marketing at Vox Media, posted the picture on Twitter.

“I’m just your subscriber and this was top of my newsfeed. Genuinely sorry but it came up in my feed and seemed public,” Schweitzer responded to Randi.

“Digital etiquette: always ask permission before posting a friend’s photo publicly. It’s not about privacy settings, it’s about human decency,” Randi admonished in a tweet after the photo was removed.

But social-media experts said that it was in fact Randi who was out of line.

“That is all social media is about: sharing experiences,” said social-media expert Julie Spira. “If you post something on the Internet, it will be shared by strangers.”

Neither Zuckerberg nor Schweitzer responded to requests for comment.