Facebook Privacy Settings Tips Part 2

Last post I discussed the basics of privacy settings and recommendations about what Facebook call "Things I share". Today I want to discuss "Things others share" and websites\apps privacy settings.

All the following settings can be set here under "Customize settings".
Things others share includes photos I'm tagged in, posts and comments of friends, allowing friends to post on your wall and lately Facebook has also added the option to suggest to your friends photos that look like you using facial recognition technology.
If you have Facebook friends that you don't trust I suggest you do not let them tag you or view your tagged pictures. As to the new feature of suggesting your pictures to your friends I advise you as a precaution before using a new feature like that which can actually compromise your privacy to just keep it disabled for a little while until it has been investigated thoroughly and shown to work well and securely.

You will also notice you have the option to let others "Check In" for you, which gives your friends the ability to make it look like you were somewhere you never went to. The most worrying thing about this feature is that with some new legal precedent this can be held against you in extreme cases. again I highly recommend that you disable that, at least for the time being.

Next is your contact information which by default is open to everybody to see. You should carefully decide who you want to be able to see your phone number or email address, and now with the new Facebook e-mail addresses you can always decide to leave that address available to anyone to see and hide all the rest (for more about the new Facebook e-mail and messages read here).

Going back to the main privacy setting window you will find the "Connecting on Facebook" link where you can control who can contact you, find you, or even add you as a friend. I really like this page because here I can set that no-one will find me unless they have a direct link to my profile. this way I don't get friend requests I wouldn't want to accept. Here I suggest you to let friends of your friends to find you and let everyone send you messages, friends request I believe should only be available to friends of friends (I let everyone send me messages or add me as friends since I'm giving away invites to all kind of services that are Facebook dependent such as RockMelt and Facebook Messages)
If after all the tinkering and playing around with the settings you are not sure how your profile looks like to other people you should try the "Preview My Profile" button on the top right. Here you can see how your profile looks like for a specific friend or to anyone else.

Last tip for today:
Apps And Websites Privacy Settings

Here you can revoke access you previously gave any app or website - I recommend going back to this page every 2-4 weeks.
You can also set which information apps that your friends use can get - I think its best not to trust your friends judgement on who can get your info. Remove all!
Public Search will control how people that finds you on Google or other search engines will see you - My preference is not to let'em find me at all.

Last for today is "Instant Personalization"

When this option is enabled all our information is automatically shared with all of Facebook partners and will expose all your information and your friends information to this websites to do whatever they want with it. Please! Disable this and ask your friends to do the same.



This was part 2 of Facebook Privacy Settings Tips.
If you find this information wrong, annoying, not informative enough or TMI please let me know and I WILL get the guy that wrote this bullshit fired. (but seriously if you have any comments you can easily and anonymously comment in the text box below)

Facebook Privacy Settings.

I want to use this post to talk about a topic which has been coming up a lot recently: Privacy on the internet, and particularly on Facebook. In today's world almost everyone has a Facebook account, which is sometimes used as a character reference when trying to get a job or into a college--and certainly a date! In short, your profile page maybe subject to a search, and most people, even those who are careful about what content they post, don't always want anyone to be able to find them or see what they posted. Some of my friends, particularly those looking for jobs or applying to schools, have taken very drastic measures to protect their privacy, such as changing their last name, or disabling their profile every time they log off of Facebook. While these actions do get the job done, in many ways it's overkill, since there are a number of simpler ways to protect or hide yourself using your privacy settings on Facebook.

While Facebook really does hold plenty of personal information, which is particularly problematic because most of it can definitively be linked back to you, since you use your real name, they also give us some tools to control the information. For example, you can choose not to show up on searches done by anyone who is not your friend or a friend of one of your friends, or you can choose not to show up in searches at all.

What I find most upsetting is that while technically we are provided with these options, Facebook seems extremely reluctant to let us know about them in a clear and straightforward manner. Whether or not this is intentional, or simply an oversight or poor design on their part, has been the subject of much speculation recently and there is no clear answer.

However, as things stand, I believe it is important that every Facebook user is aware of their options regarding privacy, and should take advantage of the privacy settings. Most important is to check your settings every once in a while, because Facebook is known for regularly making changes to their site which affects all users without giving them a choice on the matter. So in addition to visible changes to your personal profile and news feed, etc, they also often make changes to the privacy settings, which you as a user may not know about if you don't check it regularly.


Facebook Privacy Settings Tips
Part I

Facebook Privacy Settings Tips, Part 1

First and most important, not everything should go online. But if we still want to share, we don't have to share everything with everybody.
It is very important to always be aware of who has access to your information. A good rule is to try to periodically set aside a specific time of the month or week to go over your allowed apps and websites. If you don't use it, take away the authorizations!

Here are a few ways to share with your friends and still keep yourself some sense of privacy.
(Disclaimer: If it can be protected it can be hacked.)

Please. If you see that this post is missing information-- let me know and I will update it.

My first rule for privacy is to sort your friends to lists. For example:

Family
Work Friends
Ex Girlfriends
Friends from a former job
Etc.

These groups (called lists) are good for controlling all privacy settings, since Facebook lets you define who can see what according to lists. Under 'Privacy Settings' --> customize --> edit --> you can choose either to "make visible to" or "hide from" specific people, which includes lists.

Customize your Privacy
You can choose to share with friends, friends of friends, everyone, or customize. You should choose to customize it. The you can decide for every individual type of content (such as status updates, photos, etc.) who you are comfortable with seeing it (here those groups you made earlier really come in handy), and who to block, including specific people. I find that what I'm the most comfortable with is letting only (some) friends check out my photos, but letting friends of friends comment on my status. For you this might be the other way around.

The Basics
This is your name, gender, work place, etc.. You might want to let friends of your friends see that, or maybe its stuff you want to share with your friends only. Check whats right for you!

Remember that this is usually available for people searching for you on Facebook, and you may want people you actually know to be able to recognize you based on things such as:
Posts by me, Family, Relationships, Interested in and looking for, Bio and favorite quotations, Website, Religious and political views, Birthday, Places I check in to.

That's why I usually set the settings for things I know I'm already careful about posting to "Friend of Friends", assuming that almost anyone I would be interested in knowing on Facebook has at least one friend in common with me. So if we do have someone in common, you can get my basic info (note: special care should be used around "Posts by me", which depending on the nature of your status updates and wall posts might need to be on a more private setting).

It almost goes without saying that if you set your settings to "Friends of friends", anyone who is friends with one of your friends can then see all this content- not only the people you want to be able to see it. If you regularly post things which could actually offend someone or might reflect badly on you (at work, say, or when applying to schools or jobs), consider changing your settings for posts or pictures to only friends, if necessary blocking members of certain groups.

That was Part 1 of Privacy Settings Tips. in the coming parts I will include how to control things others share that relate to me, ways of communication also on the list, how to not found and how let anyone find you, Apps and websites and the Block List.