Facebook groups and the curse of the unavailable attachment

Something that has been annoying me for ages and shows no sign of being fixed gives me cause to have another dig at Facebook I'm afraid. I'm sure you've all experienced this - someone shares something to a group but all you see is this message:

Utterly pointless really - why bother telling you someone has made a post you're not allowed to see, especially as the comments then just fill up with people saying they can't see it. I know why it happens - the person whose post has been shared has set its privacy settings to something other than 'public' so those group members who are not their friends don't have permission to view it. As the person who shared it is likely to be friends with the person who originally posted it, they probably won't even know some people can't see it.



This has been going on for years and exposes what to me is a fundamental problem with Facebook's privacy settings as they currently stand. There is nothing between 'friends' and 'public' so either you restrict your post's visibility to your friends or you open it up to the whole world, and if you want everyone in a group to see it you have to go for the latter option. That means not only group members but also everyone else on the internet (even if they don't have a Facebook account!) can see it, which may not be at all desirable.

The current situation that allows sharing of posts with non-public permissions and the consequent cluttering of groups with the dreaded 'attachment unavailable' message looks very unprofessional and completely spoils the user experience. Worse than that, the suggested workaround on the Facebook user forums is inadvertently encouraging copyright breaches by advising users to download the original post and upload it directly to the group, which is technically a violation of the original poster's copyright and also circumvents all the privacy restrictions they put in place originally. There are two very simple solutions though and I can't understand why neither of these have been implemented:

1. Disallow sharing of non-public content to groups, or if sharing continues to be allowed hide all trace of the unavailable content from users who don't have permission to see it.
2. The preferred option: introduce a new privacy level for 'friends and groups', which lets the post be seen by your friends and also all members of the group it is shared to, but not by members of the public at large who are neither friends nor fellow group members.

Come on Facebook, stop all the unnecessary tinkering with things that work fine, fix this privacy problem and purge groups of the curse of the unavailable attachment. It's a simple change that would make a huge improvement and is hardly brain surgery; I've even suggested the fix so all you have to do is implement it, which can't be difficult.