How exactly does Facebook's "Friends of Friends" visiblity play together with "hide from" beyond the first level?

Question

Intro

I often am in the situation where I combine Facebook's "friends of friends" visibility with the "hide from" option. I see this more as an act of courtesy than secrecy (in which case I would use "friendy only"): i.e. I simply don't want to clutter their status updates page with stuff they're not interested in.

For example my business contacts are probably not interested in my views on some kid's movie I just watched with my son. Likewise I don't want to bore the hell out of my drinking buddies when posting some highly technical stuff. ;) Then there's of course the somewhat awkward case of the "friends" that you don't really want to involve in your lifestream for whatever reason - yet there might be no reason to hide the posting from the greater public in general.

Now I'm interested how this actually plays out beyond that first level...

Question

So, when I set an item's privacy to "Friends of friends" but at the same time hide the item from certain people, will the exclusion propagate to friends of those excluded friends? If yes, what happens if those people are also friends with a friend of mine that is allowed to see the item?

Example:

• I am friends with John and Jack.

• Bob is friends with Jack but not with me.

• When I use "friends of friends" but exclude Jack, will Bob still see it?

• What if Bob is also friends with John?

Answer 1

This is a complete guess here, but I would think that in the first scenario, Bob would not be able to see the item, but if Bob was friends with John, then he would be able to. There has to be a connection in the social graph between the item and the viewer.

The security/privacy filter should determine of list of people who have direct access to the item, which would only be your friends, then, since it was a F-of-F item, it would look to see if the person viewing has a direct connection to one of those people.

Again, that's just a guess, but I would think if it worked any other way it would be a bug.

Answer 2

In my experience restrictive permissions are only effective if you specifically block a contact from content. For example, I'm not sure Bob will not see a photo album where you specifically allow friends to view, but not friends of friends, but I can assure that if you explicitly disallow the contact Bob to see them, only then he won't.

It has to do for example if you tag Jack or John in those photos, and their privacy settings allow everyone in the world to see their tagged photos. In this scenario, I would set the photo album privacy setting to "Friends only" and also "Except Bob".