10 steps to Facebook privacy
p2pnet news view P2P | Advertising:- Facebook is a big disappointment to its owners.
People will insist on using it for its stated purpose, ie as a way of mixing with, and meeting, people online instead of as a launching ramp for guided advertising missiles.
Damn them!
But it’s also used by some print and electronic media outlets for generating story leads and with that in mind, “Facebook is used (mostly) by members as a gated community,” says Australian blogger Laurel Papworth.
They, “want to keep information within the network, not have it published in the newspaper.”
“I know, I know,” she says, “we the former passive readers are now publishers and should be aware of the invisible audience, but seriously, do you expect your emails to end up in the Sydney Morning Herald or some tabloid?”
Twitter “I understand,” Laurel goes on, after all, “it IS usually completely public, but Facebook, tsk tsk, we tend to leave settings on default – family and network can see all (not public), no RSS, no Google search etc.”
But there is a possible remedy, she points out, namely, 10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know from Nick O’Neill on AllFacebook.
Facebook friendship
“Everyday I receive an email from somebody about how their account was hacked, how a friend tagged them in the photo and they want a way to avoid it, as well as a number of other complications related to their privacy on Facebook,” says Nick.
“Over the weekend one individual contacted me to let me know that he would be removing me as a friend from Facebook because he was ‘going to make a shift with my Facebook use – going to just mostly family stuff.’ Perhaps he was tired of receiving my status updates or perhaps he didn’t want me to view photos from his personal life. Whatever the reason for ending our Facebook friendship, I figured that many people would benefit from a thorough overview on how to protect your privacy on Facebook. Below is a step by step process for protecting your privacy.
Below are Nick’s top three tips »»»
1. Use Your Friend Lists
I can`t tell you how many people are not aware of their friend lists. For those not aware of what friend lists are, Facebook describes them as a feature which allows you to create private groupings of friends based on your personal preferences. For example, you can create a Friend List for your friends that meet for weekly book club meetings. You can create Friend Lists for all of your organizational needs, allowing you to quickly view friends by type and send messages to your lists.
There are a few very important things to remember about friend lists:
- You can add each friend to more than one friend group
- Friend groups should be used like tags as used elsewhere around the web
- Friend Lists can have specific privacy policies applied to them
I`ll touch on each of the things listed above in more detail later. A typical setup for groups would be Friends, Family, and Professional. These three groups can then be used to apply different privacy policies. For example, you may want your friends to see photos from the party you were at last night, but you don`t want your family or professional contacts to see those photos.
Using friend lists is also extremely useful for organizing your friends if you have a lot of them. For instance I have about 20 friend lists and I categorize people by city (New York, San Francisco, D.C., Tel Aviv, etc), where I met them (conferences, past co-workers, through this blog), and my relationship with them (professional, family, social, etc).
You can configure your friend lists by visiting the friends area of your Facebook.
2. Remove Yourself From Facebook Search Results
My mom is a teacher and one of the first things she asked me when she joined Facebook is how she could make sure her students couldn`t see that she was on the site. Understandably my mom doesn`t want her middle school students to know what she`s up to in her personal life. There are numerous reasons that individuals don`t want their information to show up in search results on Facebook, and it`s simple to turn off your public visibility.
How to Remove Yourself From Facebook Search Results
Now that you`ve decided that you would like to remove yourself from Facebook`s search results, here`s how to do it:
- Visit your search privacy settings page
- Under Search Visibility select Only Friends (Remember, doing so will remove you from Facebook search results, so make sure you want to be removed totally. Otherwise, you can select another group, such as My Networks and Friends which I believe is the default.)
- Click Save Changes
By default, Facebook makes your presence visible to the network you are in. Frequently, people aren`t aware of their visibility, so this is one of the first settings that users wish to modify. By selecting Customize from the search visibility drop down you can make your settings even more granular.
3. Remove Yourself From Google
Facebook gets A TON of traffic from displaying user profiles in search engines. Not all of your profile is displayed though. Currently the information displayed in the search profile is limited to: your profile picture, a list of your friends, a link to add you as a friend, a link to send you a message, and a list of up to approximately 20 fan pages that you are a member of.
For some people, being displayed in the search engines is a great way to let people get in contact with you, especially if you don`t have an existing website. Facebook also tends to rank high in the search results, so if you want to be easy to find, making your search profile can be a great idea. Many people don`t want any of their information to be public though.
By visiting the same search privacy settings page listed in the previous step, you can control the visibility of your public search listing which is visible to Google and other search engines. You can turn off your public search listing by simply unchecking the box next to the phrase Create a public search listing for me and submit it for search engine indexing as pictured in the image below.
Click here for the remaining seven pointers.
Laurel Papworth – Keep Facebook Private, February 3, 2009
AllFacebook – 10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know, February 2, 2009
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February 3rd, 2009 at 2:50 pm
0) Don’t use facebook
Facebook privacy secured. Or better facebook could ’start secure’ and need you to click to unsecure yourself. Opt-in? … nahh Opt-out is the cool way.