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Because my friends and I are like this, we wrote on her wall anyway, like, "HAPPY BIRTHDAY EMMA! IT IS YOUR BIRTHDAY WHICH IS GREAT! WHERE IS THE PARTY MY DOG?" and the like.
And then a funny thing happened: Facebook told errrrrrrrybody it was her birthday.
Intrigued, fellow Lemondrop editor Erin Scottberg and I tried a bold experiment: Will Facebook tell everybody it's your birthday if a bunch of people write it is on your wall? Does Facebook have some kind of bot that recognizes birthday well-wishing? I asked a couple of mutual friends to write messages of cumpleaños on Erin's pared:
And here's what came up in the feed:
So, because it wasn't Erin's actual birthday, nothing happened. (Except that a bunch of her friends who know that her real birthday is in November got all confused.)
While there isn't some kind of evil Facebook birthday robot, it's kind of lame that having friends like me can supersede your privacy settings.
Birthday Scrooges, consider yourselves told.
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Friday 13 August
By Reality Show Chick
I know for a fact that Facebook doesn't share birthdays if you have them hidden, because I hid mine too. And, on my birthday, I got a few wishes from people who actually remembered, not the barrage of wishes from people I barely know but happen to be friends with. So it does work. I think you just have a lot of really good friends with really good memories.
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Friday 13 August
By Fred Wolens
I work at Facebook and someone forwarded your blog post to me. It’s never our intention to share people’s information in a way they don’t want or expect so thanks for bringing this to our attention.
It turns out that this is a little complicated so I’d like to clarify a few points:
--There is both a visibility setting on your profile and a privacy setting in your privacy settings for “birthday”.
--There are two features of Newsfeed you observe in your blog post: 1. Special aggregation on someone’s birthday (the first example, “X and Y wrote on Z’s wall for her birthday” and “Birthday: Today”) and 2. Regular aggregation that happens with any set of similar wall posts (the second example, “A, B and C wrote on D’s wall”).
--No. 1 respects the privacy setting but not the visibility setting of your birthday. That is, if you restrict the privacy setting of your birthday, none of your friends will see this special birthday aggregation in their newsfeed (although, they will still appear on your wall), and wall posts on the users birthday will be treated as normal. We agree that’s it’s a little inconsistent to respect the privacy setting but not the visibility setting so, next week, we’re going to make it so that either setting will stop special birthday aggregation.
--No. 2 is just an example aggregating similar stories. So, if your friends all decide to wish you a Happy St. Patrick’s day but it’s actually Arbor Day, your other friends may see in their news feed, “X and Y wrote on Z’s wall: Happy St. Paddy’s! And Shamrocks rule!” We think it would be weird to try to censor posts or newsfeed distribution because someone has their dates mixed up.
--Finally, it’s important to note that in all of these cases, aggregated wall posts only includes posts where you are mutual friends, that is friends with both the author of the post and the owner of the wall. So News Feed will continue to show you the same stories as before but will conveniently group these posts together to improve the experience for everyone.
Like I said, it’s a little complicated but we’re going to be simplifying things a bit thanks to your post. Let us know if you have any questions.
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Monday 04 October
By Jane
Does it show on newsfeed if you edit your birthday or if you hid or showed it? Like how it would if you changed or added a school to your profile?
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Monday 04 October
By Jane
Will it show on newsfeed if you changed/hid/showed your birthday? Like how it would if you changed or added a school to your profile?
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Friday 22 October
By bg!
how did you make the letters all me big like that?
can you show me how?
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