Protect your privacy against Facebook
Facebook has become hugely popular, but it’s also known to be careless with its members’ privacy. How can you better protect the privacy of your Facebook profile?
Facebook and privacy
With over 400 million users, Facebook is an immensely popular online community. However, what most people don’t know is that Facebook has been reducing the privacy protection of its members for a couple of years now.
The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook (http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy) shows the changes in default profile settings over time. Configuring your privacy in Facebook has become a complex procedure: there are more than 50 different privacy settings with over 170 different parameters to be configured. Moreover, more and more of these settings are “open” by default. So large numbers of Facebook users unwittingly reveal more information about themselves to the outside world than they would like.
Just visit Openbook (http://youropenbook.org), the search engine for Facebook updates, and enter a fairly vague search term such as “drunk”. You’ll be amazed at the number of Facebook users who post publicly accessible updates about their drunkenness at the wheel or at work...
At regular intervals, Facebook announces - under public pressure - that it is going to simplify its privacy settings. However, it’s best to remain wary.
Protect your privacy better!
It’s not easy to check whether you’ve configured the right Facebook privacy settings which offer best protection against undesired use of your details. Using ReclaimPrivacy (http://www.reclaimprivacy.org), however, you can have your settings checked automatically. Simply visit this free site and drag the Scan for Privacy button to the bookmarks toolbar of your browser. Next, log in to Facebook, go to your Account; Privacy Settings page and click on this button. A pop-up screen will give an overview of those settings which are secure and those which involve a risk. In the latter case, you’re pointed to the appropriate page where you can modify these settings. This generally amounts to changing the default value “Everyone” to “Friends Only”.
When you don’t fancy doing this yourself, you can also call on the SaveFace service (http://www3.untangle.com/saveface). It can adjust a number of parameters automatically.
Fine-tuning
If you think the Friends Only setting is too restricted, you can create separate lists of friends, so that you can specifywho is allowed to see what.
This is done via Search Friends; Create a New List. You could for instance create separate groups of “Private friends”, “Colleagues” and “Fellow alumni”. You can fine-tune access to these lists via Account; Privacy Settings; Settings; Customise. In the roll-down menu, choose Customise and select one or more groups in Make visible.
Common sense
Even if you configure very strict privacy settings in Facebook, it remains virtually impossible to guarantee that no information is made public without your knowledge. So our advice is simple: only post information on Facebook which you would let strangers see as well.
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