Privacy on Facebook

According to statistics, Facebook has more than 400 million active users worldwide. If we consider Facebook to be a country, then Facebook would make the third most populous country in the world after China and India!!!
 

    
More than 25 billion pieces of content like Web Links, photo albums, videos, notes, etc are shared each month. Almost every user use applications like games and quizzes on Facebook.

But unfortunately, most of them don’t know the implications of entering personal information. Almost everyone can see almost everything that the user puts up on Facebook. A lot of people have got into trouble for things they have posted on Facebook.

This Mom’s Guide will show what you can do to be safe and maintain your privacy on Facebook.
 

1. Use/Organize Friend Lists

Many users don’t know about this feature provided by Facebook.

Friend Lists basically provides organized grouping of your friends based on your personal preferences. For example, you can create a Friend List for your friends that meet for weekly book club meetings. This allows you to quickly view friends by type and send messages to your lists.

Important things to remember :-

• You can add each friend to more than one friend list.
• Friend Lists can have specific privacy policies applied to them.

Steps to create and customize Friend Lists:-
 

1. Your browser may not support display of this image. Click the "Create New List" that appears beneath the filters on the left side of your home page or your Friends page. Or, click the "Create New List" button from the "All Friends" tab of the Friends page.
2. Type the title of your list and hit enter.
3. Add friends to the list by typing their names into the "Add to List" field or selecting them from the list.
4. Select "Create List" to store your changes.

You can add privacy setting by going to Privacy Settings.

Under Privacy Settings you can control privacy of your Friend Lists by editing Personal Information, Contacts, Friends, etc.
 

2. Privacy Settings – Profile Privacy

Here you can control who can see which information. Your privacy setting should be simple and easy to understand. There are three basic levels of privacy: Friends, Friends of Friends and Everyone.

Adjust privacy of what you share.

Options available under Privacy Settings:-

1. Personal Information and Posts:- This covers your Bio, Birthday, Political Views, Posts and comments on them, Photos etc. According to your preference you can make this information available to Friends and Friends of Friends. It is recommended to make information like your Photos and videos available to Friends only.
2. Contact Information:- This covers your contact details like emails address and phone number. It is recommended to make this information available to Friends only.
3. Friends, Tags and Connections:- This controls the information people can see on  you profile like your Pages, list of friends, your Relationship Status, Interests, etc. These settings let you control who sees this information. For example, you may want to keep your relationship status a secret or let only Friends know and let Friends of Friends see your Political views and Interests.
4. Applications and Websites:- Lets you control what information is available to applications and websites.
5. Search:- Lets you control who can search on Facebook and search engines. It is recommended to uncheck “Allow” option of Public Search Results. The Facebook Search Results can be set according to your preference.
6. Block List:- Lets you control who can interact with you on Facebook. You can block any profile from your list of friends.

3. Applications Settings

Facebook allows you to add and use third party applications. These applications use your information to process results. Though Facebook has published terms of service to inform developers what is and is not acceptable behavior, but there is always the danger that people abuse the ability.

Therefore you must carefully add these applications. The only thing that can be done is to authorize only those applications you require and trust.

Go to Account > Application Settings.

Change the drop down from Recently Used to Authorized. Now you can see all the applications you have authorized to get access to all your profile information.

You can also check the applications Allowed to Post and Granted Additional Permissions. You can remove all the unwanted applications.
 

4. Disable Facebook’s “Instant Personalization”

Recently, Facebook added new features that let some websites access your personal information. These sites personalize your experience using information you have made visible to everyone as well as your publicly available information. This includes your Name, Profile Picture, Gender, Current City, Networks, Friend List, and Pages

As of now Facebook has allowed only three site to use this “Instant Personalization: feature, they are – Docs.com, Pandora.com and Yepl.com.

This feature actually allows websites to display “Like” button. If you click this “Like” button, it will show all your friends on Facebook that you liked something on this particular website. This can be done even without logging into Facebook. All it requires is to login sometime before you visit the site. When you arrive on these sites, you'll see a notification from Facebook at the top of the page. You can easily opt-out of experiencing this on these sites by clicking "No Thanks" on the blue Facebook notification on the top of partner sites.

This feature is by default on. So if don’t want these website to have access to your information, you will have to specifically turn this option off.

Turn off Instant Personalization:-

Go to Accounts à Privacy Settings à Applications and Websites.

Click “Edit Setting” at “Instant Personalization” at the bottom.

At the bottom of the page, a lone check box is provided to enable or disable the feature. By default it’s on. Uncheck it to turn off the Instant Personalization feature.

It’s done! Now Facebook will not share your personal information with websites for Instant Personalization until your turn  it on again.

But this won’t prevent your friends from sharing and using your information. Your friends may still share public Facebook information about you to personalize their experience on these partner sites unless you block the application.

So how do you stop that? Stop it by blocking those applications!

Under Applications and Websites, Edit settings for “What your friends can share about you”.

If you don’t want any information to be shared with specific applications, either by you or your friends, you have to uncheck to specifically block those applications by them.

Lastly, don’t click the “like” button at any website you visit. This will prevent your information from being shared.
 

5. Delete/Deactivate Facebook Account

If you are quitting Facebook, then you have two options – Deactivate and Delete.

Out of the two options, Deactivation is simple. It can be done from Settings page. But de-activation will retain all your information on Facebook, including your photos, videos, friends, etc. But this information is made inaccessible to other Facebook users. However, if you want to reactivate your account, you just have to login on to Facebook again.

If you don’t think you will use Facebook again and would like to delete your account permanently, you will have to submit a deletion request here.

Note, unlike deactivation option, once account deleted, there is no option of recovery.
 

	Abhijeet Patil abhijeet@chmag.in

Incidents like Facebook account getting hacked or leakage of information keep happening regularly. So it is recommended to delete your account rather than deactivating it. It is better to be safe than sorry!

Conclusion

These are just few ways of maintaining your privacy and keeping  your account safe. There are many more small things to keep in mind but the above settings are most important. Your browser may not support display of this image. So follow all the steps and be safe!

Happy Social Networking