I suggest that sloppiness is the source of all the problems Facebook have with privacy issues.

I am a webmaster of a museum so naturally I am also working with the Facebook website in order to promote the organization. I have set up the page of the organization and I embed different Facebook tools in the site I run.

Working with Facebook is frustrating.

A page can have an image on the side of the page and a thumbnail for the posts of the page. The thumbnail can be a part of the pages' image or all of it. The admin of the page needs to create the image for the page so it will also look good as a thumbnail. I have struggled with this issue and I think I have somehow succeeded.

I was looking for a Facebook page of a large museum and I didn't have to search hard until I have found the page of MoMa on film. The manager of the MoMa Facebook page didn't get the thumbnail right. Look, the thumbnail is cropped. He or she had to choose what they wanted to look good, the big image or the thumbnail.



It shouldn't be so hard. Page admins should be able to upload different images for the page – a big one and a thumbnail.

Facebook should assist its users to make their pages look good.

No one at Facebook thought that this is an issue.

But this is just one anecdote. During my use of Facebook I have met many areas with sloppy thinking and sloppy execution.

So instead of thinking of all this sloppiness as coincidence, I suggest that it is embedded in the company's DNA.

I am sure no one at Facebook said "let's do sloppy work" but I am almost sure detailed thinking and execution is not rewarded.

This leads me to speculate the source of all the problems Facebook have around the privacy of its users.

Sloppiness.

"Let's try this"

"No, they don't like it. Let's change that a bit"

Et cetera.

Facebook is a very big company with a huge user base, but it doesn't mean they should be looked at as other big companies.

Google show much less sloppiness, so does Microsoft and other top internet companies.

They have a tradition of "first think and then do".

It seems to me Facebook doesn't have this tradition.

I suggest that when we analyze the actions of Facebook as a company and as a maker of software products, we should put "sloppiness" as a major parameter in considering what went wrong and what is about to happen.

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About the author: Hanan Cohen is an Israeli internet activist currently working as the Webmaster of the Bloomfield Science Museum in Jerusalem. blog comments powered by Disqus