Another Tech Blog

I will summarize here, but the full article by Nick O’Neill from www.allfacebook.com is a great read, and something I wish I had written.  Facebook is a great tool, but in a world where information and identity theft is rampant, you need to know how to protect yourself from, well, yourself.

1) Use Friends lists to group your friends into logical groups.  This allows you to grant different access rights to different groups of people.

2) Remove yourself from Facebook search results.  Like the author, my family is chock full of teachers.  For the most part, they don’t want their students to randomly find their personal information from a Facebook search, but still want to be on Facebook for family and friends.  The solution?  Remove yourself from Facebook search results.  You do this from the “search privacy settings” page.

3) Remove your Facebook self from Google search results.  As you know if you Google yourself (doesn’t everyone do this?) your Facebook profile will come up pretty quickly.  You can remove yourself from Google searches from the “search privacy settings” page – uncheck the “Create a Public Search Listing for me …” check box.

4) Control who sees your tagged photos – You can do this from your profile privacy page.  The cool thing is if you’ve set up your friends groups right, you can allow access to tagged photos by group.  That way the photo of you that you don’t want your boss to see won’t get you fired.

5) Control who sees your photo albums – as with tagged photos, not all pictures are for all eyes.  Check out the Photo Privacy Page.  From there you can control who sees what.  Very handy.

6) Control how your relationship status is displayed in news feeds.  Everyone likes to tout their relationship, but do you really want everyone (boss, business contacts) to know?  Uncheck the “Change relationship status” box on the News Feed and Wall section of your Privacy settings.  This will prevent people from seeing changed to your relationship status in their news feeds.

7) Be sure that applications don’t publish embarrassing news feed posts.  Many applications you sign up for post items to your news feed that are potentially embarrassing.  Be sure that you scan your profile every time you install an application, or better yet, avoid applications completely.

8) Control who sees your contact information.  If you use Facebook for business and for personal contacts, you can control who sees what contact information from you using your Friends Groups.  You can add multiple email address and phone contact items, then edit the custom privacy settings for each to control who sees them.

9) Avoid embarrassing wall posts.   Facebook lets you control not only who posts to your wall, but also who can see those posts.  In the Profile section you can change who posts to your wall by choosing “custom” from the “Wall Posts” drop down.  From there you can use your Friends groups to control who posts and who sees what.

10) Like your hands, keep your friends to yourself.  I love seeing who is friends with my friends, but some people don’t want to share, and in some cases, it’s probably not a good idea to share.  Once again, you can customize who can see your friends list using your friends groups.

There are endless ways to control your privacy on Facebook, but you need to take the time to sort through the settings.  Friends Grouping is a great place to start and ensures that you have separation of your business and personal contacts.  Get to know your privacy settings!!

You know all of those Facebook quizzes and causes and snowball fights and other lists – “25 Random Things” etc?  Did you know that when you sign up for these applications you are giving the application developer access to all of your profile information?  Facebook is notoriously fast and loose with your data, which is why I ignore all requests for causes, lists etc.  The simple truth is that you don’t know what Facebook is doing with your data, and they won’t tell you.

Not any more, thanks to our neighbors in the Great White North.

The Canadian Government has muscledFacebook into making some significant changes to the way that your data is managed.  This is good new for your Privacy, but it emphasizes how little control you have over what happens to your data once you hit the enter key.

The basics of the changes (to be implemented over the next year) are:

1) Applications will have to tell you what data they want and you will have to give them explicit permission to use the data.  Developers will have to tell you how they will use the data too.

2) Account removal – as is stands now, you don’t know what happens to your account when you “deactivate” it on Facebook.  You might think that your data is removed, but is isn’t.  Facebook has agreed to give you the option to deactivate or to delete your account.  Unclear what will happen to data already sent to others (think birthday information on other peoples calendars) so we’ll see what happens here.

3) Privacy for Dead People – After you die, your account does not necessarily go away.  Facebook will update is Privacy Policy to explain what happens when it’s owner passes away.

There are still many problems with Facebook, and there is still litigation pending in the US courts regarding how your data is being used by Facebook at others.  For more information on this, have a look at the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s website, http://epic.org/.  There is a section on Facebook that outlines their concerns, and it’s a great read.

The lesson here is be VERY careful with your information.  I don’t want to be Polly-Anna-ish here, but you can’t be too careful.  Don’t make it easy for people to steal your identity!