Digg has Privacy Problem
When Digg added the shout function a while back, it was met with mixed reactions. Personally I liked the feature but one thing I didn’t care for was everyone and their brother being able to see any shout or note that my friends sent me. No worries, Digg has an option make your shouts private right? As it turns out, not so much.
While surfing around a few Digg profiles, I noticed something really strange. At the bottom of the page where shouts normally appear I saw this:
Notice the “Sorry! Ben has decided to keep his shouts private” massage? Did you also notice the “View All Shouts” link in the upper right hand corner? I wasn’t all that concerned until I glanced up and realized that I wasn’t logged in to my account! For reference, this is how the profile should have looked:
As you can see, the View All Shouts link is missing from this profile and there’s no way for me to see those shouts. It appeared that something was wrong with my account.
I quickly logged in to make sure I hadn’t accidentally changed my settings and was very surprised to see that in fact I hadn’t.
To make sure I wasn’t crazy, I contacted a few friends and asked whether their shouts were set to private. Several of them responded that they were but sure enough, I could see all their shouts, no matter what their settings were at.
It does appear that the option is working for at least some accounts. For example, the screen shot from 1KrazyKorean’s account shows that those shouts are being kept private, however, those seem to be few and far between.
Needless to say, if you think your shouts are currently set to private, you might want to check again.
Hat tip to Tamar of Techipedia for helping me investigate this one. She’s also covering the problem in her post Digg, Your Privacy is an Illusion.
Update: Not surprisingly, this post was submitted to Digg and in fact, the CEO left a comment. Jay Adelson says “Ok, message received. We have a team looking into it now. It’s a very, very good team, too. 
” I’d expect the issue to be fixed shortly.
Update II: As you can see from Jay’s comment below, shouts are now truly private. Thanks for the quick response on this one!
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That is not good – if everyone can see what you’re saying. That happened to me the first time I used a travel chat room – I was telling my friend what an obnxious prick some guy sounded, but I forgot to say it privately!
Fixed! Thanks for bringing this to our attention, folks.
Awesome Jay, thanks for the quick action on that! I’ve updated my post to reflect the fix.
Something to be clear on, that Tamar asked and I thought I’d repost here…
Tamar was concerned that if you select “Show my shouts to no one,” your shouts out to others still show up on your history.
So I posted this to her:
“I understand what you’re asking for.
I think the problem was ours for not communicating our intent… Shouting, as the name describes, was supposed to be public communication. We wanted people to be able to manage their own page and how it is displayed, but it’s true, by doing so it probably gives a false sense of privacy with shouts.
What you really are asking for is a private messaging system, which was never the intent of shouts. It was more like writing on a wall in Facebook, or a public post…
We’re looking into a private messaging system as a feature. Meanwhile, either we need to be more clear on the privacy levels you’re describing, add more privacy, or do something…because it’s clearly confusing people.
Stay tuned.”
Sorry for the confusion, all.
Jay, I understood that shouts to others would still show up in history and possibly on their board. But we weren’t supposed to see the shouts someone received if they had marked them as “show to no one” right?
Correct. And now that is fixed. However, Tamar’s point is you can find that shout on the person who sent it’s history.
Yeah, it does sound like she’s asking for a private messaging system which would probably be nice but as you said, obviously wasn’t the intent of the shout function.
Wow, that was quick action, before a majority of people could even realise that there was a problem, it was fixed! Pretty amazing.
The power of the web. A blog entry or two and we could move the world.
Way to go to the Digg team for being so quick to respond and good eye Ben!
On a technical aspect NOTHING on the web is truly private. There is always a digital imprint left somewhere. Thankfully you have to be pretty skilled to find it so I don’t have to worry about my mother finding any of my contraband.
Wow, an impressive response by Digg. Gotta give ‘em credit for jumping on this one!
I had no idea there was a privacy problem with Digg. I actually don’t really use did a lot myself. I use to several months ago, but I have found other social media sites that I enjoy more. That is pretty cool you got a comment from the CEO of Digg though.
Jay Adelson on January 11th, 2008 at 2:01 pm said “fixed” ROFLOL. Look at the date of my screen shots, April 28, 2008. BS Jay, it don’t look fixed to me and it is STILL not fixed.
I remember when I had this problem! It caused me to leave Digg alone for a while.
Now that Digg has removed shouts this no longer exists.
The bad news is Digg has also removed half of it’s page views since Facebook sharing and Twitter is not quite as effective as email. LOL