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[unixronin]

LiveJournal has, as most of you already know, sprung another surprise on all of its users.  In brief, the feature is basically simple enough:  It allows LiveJournal users to automatically crosspost to Facebook or Twitter.

However, it is badly designed.  It has become apparent that it allows commenters responding to a locked post to crosspost their comments, possibly including quoted material from the locked post, to Twitter or Facebook — at which point it's essentially out there in front of the entire world.

This is obviously unacceptable.  LiveJournal really did not think this through at all, and the displeasure over it can be seen in the ongoing shitstorm in the comments on the news announcement (currently around five thousand comments).

Granted, I make most or all of my original posts on Dreamwidth these days, and thence crosspost them to LiveJournal — with the same privacy restrictions.  Suffice it to say that if I see fit to restrict a post for any reason, and I subsequently find that a commenter has exposed restricted content to the entire world, I will not be happy.

suzilem once posted the following disclaimer, which I enthusiastically adopted, in response to another site that had similar ramifications:

"I am not, nor will I ever be, a user of any service that defeats other journals' privacy filters."

It looks as though, unless they rethink and rework this "feature" in very short order, LiveJournal has become a service that DEFEATS ITS OWN privacy filters, in the pursuit of Facebook and Twitter eyeball share.  This is not a good path to go down, and I see a shark tank waiting at its end.