Facebook Privacy Tips
Many people tend to get bent out of shape every time Facebook changes anything. I’m wasn’t in that camp until Facebook Timeline hit. As a Web developer, I appreciate that Facebook successfully manages a community with more than 800 million users, which offers them a bit of forgiveness for little interface issues. Beyond that, I bet if the people complaining about new interfaces went back three months later, they wouldn’t even recognize the old one and would agree that things had, in fact, improved.
As a Web-savvy individual, I don’t have any great love for Facebook’s approach to privacy settings. I find them cumbersome and imagine a lot of users don’t take the time to navigate, therefore leaving their accounts wide open for perusing. I periodically check on my settings to make sure everything looks good, even logging out and Googling myself to see what other people see.
I was therefore rather shocked to discover that when I upgraded to Timeline, Facebook automatically changed the privacy settings on all my photos to make them viewable by all Facebook users without notifying me. In fact, it wasn’t until a non-friend (who soon became my friend) told me that she liked my Burning Man photos that I became aware that all my photos were being shared with all 800 million of my closest friends.
The fact that managing privacy on Facebook feels a little like managing a database is one reason apps like Foursquare are so popular. Not only did Foursquare create a superior culture and interface for checking in to your favorite places, they steered around the Facebook privacy settings issue by making it easy for you to collect your privacy settings under a separate app rather than digging through Facebook. In other words, when you launch Foursquare you aren’t connected to anyone until you add them, so it’s much easier to know exactly who has access to the information you share through that app.
I think we’ll find this approach of organizing information and privacy under a brand name will become more common in the future, making it easier for people to associate apps, communities, and privacy settings with a brand rather than as one of numerous settings in your Facebook account.
Here are a few tips for managing Facebook privacy:
1) Make sure your profile isn’t open to everyone (even non-Facebook users) by confirming your Default Privacy setting for new posts. Click on the arrow in the top right corner
Then choose the option you want, most likely “Friends.”
2) Make sure your past posts, photos and any other sensitive information are not available to all Facebook users. This was the main problem in my case, since all my old photos were made available without my knowledge. On the same page, find this option and click “Manage Past Post Visibility.”
Click “Limit Old Posts” when you see this:
And finally click “Confirm” when you see this screen to limit all past posts to be viewed only by your friends:
3) Facebook has created little tools all over the place to make it easier for you to share something with friends or other specific groups. In the example below, this posting will be shown to Friends by default, but I can easily change that by clicking “Friends” and selecting another group or list.
Good luck and let me know if you have any other privacy tips!
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Categories: ePiphany Featured Story, How To, Social Media, Technology, Web |
